"It's almost dark," her pleasant accents broke in upon his revery. "Would you mind lighting the lamp? My hands are all wet and sticky."
"Assuredly."
Whitaker got up, found matches, and lighted a tin kerosene lamp in a bracket on the wall. The windows darkened and the walls took on a sombre yellow as the flame grew strong and steady.
"I'm quite finished." The girl scrubbed her arms and hands briskly with a dry towel and turned down her sleeves, facing him with her fine, frank, friendly smile. "If you're ready...."
"Whenever you are," he said with an oddly ceremonious bow.
To his surprise she drew back, her brows and lips contracting to level lines, her eyes informed with the light of wonder shot through with the flashings of a resentful temper.
"Why do you look at me so?" she demanded sharply. "What are you thinking...?" She checked, her frown relaxed, her smile flickered softly. "Am I such a fright—?"
"I beg your pardon," he said hastily. "I was merely thinking, wondering...."
She seemed about to speak, but said nothing. He did not round out his apology. A little distance apart, they stood staring at one another in that weird, unnatural light, wherein the glow from the lamp contended garishly with the ebbing flush of day. And again he was mute in bewildered inquiry before that puzzling phenomenon of inscrutable emotion which once before, since his awakening, had been disclosed to him in her mantling colour, in the quickening of her breath, and the agitation of her bosom, in the timid, dumb questioning of eyes grown strangely shy and frightened.
And then, in a twinkling, an impatient gesture exorcised the inexplicable mood that had possessed her, and she regained her normal, self-reliant poise as if by witchcraft.