"And I am horribly afraid," he continued, "that you have an inkling into my absurd symbols of speech."
That brought her eyes back to his and there was something indefinably touching in their soft, deprecating shyness. . . . Barry's gaze lingered unconsciously.
He began to wonder about her.
He had wondered about her that night at the restaurant, he remembered—wondered and forgotten. He had been unhappy that night, with the peculiar unhappiness of a naturally decisive man wretchedly in two minds, and she had given him a half hour of forgetfulness.
Afterwards he had concluded that his impressions had played him false, that no daughter of to-day could possibly be as touchingly young, as innocently enchanting.
But she was quite real, it seemed. And she sat there upon his hearth rug with her eyes like pools of night. . . . What in the world had happened to her in this America to which she had come in such gay confidence? What was she trying to hide?
What in all the sorry, stupid world had put that shadow into her look, that hurt droop to her lips?
He could not conceive that real tragedy could so much as brush her with the tips of its wings, but some trouble was there, some difficulty.
His pipe was out but he drew on it absently. Maria Angelina snuggled closer and closer into her pile of cushions and went to sleep.
After she was asleep he rose and stood looking down at her, and he found his heart queerly touched by that scratched cheek and the childish way she tucked her hand under the other cheek as she slept.