He would not speak, but something in the voice made his anger go. After a little it came, and louder this time: "Pierre?"
He did not stir.
She whirled and sat on the edge of the bunk, crying: "Pierre!" with a note of fright. Then she flushed richly.
"I thought perhaps you were gone. I thought—Pierre—I was afraid—I mean I hoped—"
She could not go on.
And still he persisted in that silence, his arms folded, the keen blue eyes considering her as if from a great distance.
She explained: "I was afraid—Pierre! Why don't you speak? Tell me, are you angry?"
And she sprang up and made a pace toward him. She had never seemed so little manlike, so wholly womanly. For the thick coils of hair were loosed on her head, and the black hair framed a face stained, flushed, with eyes that were like a great black, bottomless well of sorrow and wistfulness. And the hand which stretched toward him, palm up, was a symbol of everything new and strange that he found in her.
He had seen it balled to a small, angry fist, brown and dangerous; he had seen it gripping the butt of a revolver, ready for the draw; he had seen it tugging at the reins and holding a racing horse in check with an ease which a man would envy; but never before had he seen it turned palm up, to his knowledge; and now, because he could not speak to her, according to his plan, he studied her thoroughly for the first time.
Slender and marvelously made was that hand. The whole woman was in it, finely fashioned, delicate, made for beauty, not for use. It was all he could do to keep from exclaiming.