“Come in and sit down,” said Annie. Then the young man stepped into a room which was pretty in spite of itself. There was an old Brussels carpet with an enormous rose pattern. The haircloth furniture gave out gleams like black diamonds under the light of the lamp. In a corner stood a what-not piled with branches of white coral and shells. Annie's grandfather had been a sea-captain, and many of his spoils were in the house. Possibly Annie's own occupation of it was due to an adventurous strain inherited from him. Perhaps the same impulse which led him to voyage to foreign shores had led her to voyage across a green yard to the next house.
Tom Reed sat down on the sofa. Annie sat in a rocking-chair near by. At her side was a Chinese teapoy, a nest of lacquer tables, and on it stood a small, squat idol. Annie's grandmother had been taken to task by her son-in-law, the Reverend Silas, for harboring a heathen idol, but she had only laughed,
“Guess as long as I don't keep heathen to bow down before him, he can't do much harm,” she had said.
Now the grotesque face of the thing seemed to stare at the two Occidental lovers with the strange, calm sarcasm of the Orient, but they had no eyes or thought for it.
“Why didn't you come to the door if you heard the bell ring?” asked Tom Reed, gazing at Annie, slender as a blade of grass in her clinging green gown.
“Because I was not able to break my will then. I had to break it to go out in the yard and ask you to come in, but when the bell rang I hadn't got to the point where I could break it.”
“What on earth do you mean, Annie?”
Annie laughed. “I don't wonder you ask,” she said, “and the worst of it is I can't half answer you. I wonder how much, or rather how little explanation will content you?”
Tom Reed gazed at her with the eyes of a man who might love a woman and have infinite patience with her, relegating his lack of understanding of her woman's nature to the background, as a thing of no consequence.
“Mighty little will do for me,” he said, “mighty little, Annie dear, if you will only tell a fellow you love him.”