Now he heard a cheery, faint crackling from the house and a rosy glow pervaded the gloom beyond the doorway. It brought home to Anthony the fact that he was tired; weariness went through all his limbs like the sound of music. Music in fact, for the girl was singing softly—to herself.
He took his foot from the stirrup, unsaddled, and carried the saddle into the room. He found Sally crouched at the fire and piling bits of wood on the rising flame. Her face was squinted to avoid the smoke, and she sheltered her eyes with one hand. At his coming she smiled briefly up at him and turned immediately back to the fire. The silence of that smile brought their comradeship sharply home to him. It was as if she understood his weariness and knew that the fire was infinitely comforting. Anthony frowned; he did not wish to be understood. It was irritating—indelicate.
He sat on one of the bunks, and when she took her place on the other he studied her covertly, with side glances, for he was beginning to feel strangely self-conscious. It was the situation rather than the girl that gained upon him, but he felt shamed that he should be so uncertain of himself and so liable to expose some weakness before the girl.
That in turn raised a blindly selfish desire to make her feel and acknowledge his mastery. He did not define the emotion exactly, nor see clearly what he wished to do, but in a general way he wanted to be necessary to her, and to let her know at the same time that she was nothing to him. He was quite sure that the opposite was the truth just now.
At this point he shrugged his shoulders, angry that he should have slipped so easily into the character of a sullen boy, hating a benefactor for no reason other than his benefactions; but the same vicious impulse made him study the face of Sally Fortune with an impersonal, coldly critical eye. It was not easy to do, for she sat with her head tilted back a little, as though to take the warmth of the fire more fully. The faint smile on her lips showed her comfort, mingled with retrospection.
Here he lost the trend of his thoughts by beginning to wonder of what she could be thinking, but he called himself back sharply to the analysis of her features. It was a game with which he had often amused himself among the girls of his eastern acquaintance. Their beauty, after all, was their only weapon, and when he discovered that that weapon was not of pure steel, they became nothing; it was like pushing them away with an arm of infinite length.
There was food for criticism in Sally's features. The nose, of course, was tipped up a bit, and the mouth too large, but Anthony discovered that it was almost impossible to centre his criticism on either feature. The tip-tilt of the nose suggested a quaint and infinitely buoyant spirit; the mouth, if generously wide, was exquisitely made. She was certainly not pretty, but he began to feel with equal certainty that she was beautiful.
A waiting mood came on him while he watched, as one waits through a great symphony and endures the monotonous passages for the sake of the singing bursts of harmony to which the commoner parts are a necessary background. He began to wish that she would turn her head so that he could see her eyes. They were like the inspired part of that same symphony, a beauty which could not be remembered and was always new, satisfying. He could make her turn by speaking, and knowing that this was so, he postponed the pleasure like a miser who will only count his gold once a day.
From the side view he dwelt on the short, delicately carved upper lip and the astonishingly pleasant curve of the cheek.
"Look at me," he said abruptly.