She had no answer to that, or else the heat of the fire was making her drowsy. Leaning forward, she sat blinking at it, her arms folded on her knees.
Breaking up twigs with one hand to jerk them into the flames with the other, he went on piling up causes for bitterness, though he no longer spoke them aloud,—they came from too near his heart for that.
“I should have helped him, if I had acted out my own nature, and he would have done me honor in return. I should have left this emptiness of beasts and trees to measure myself against men. It would go hard with me if I could not prove myself more than that grinning French-broken ape. She showed him favor; she would have shown me more.... She might ... in time ... she might even.... More unlikely things happened to my father!”
IV
“Where I see the ears, I expect the wolf”
—Northern saying.
Neither of them paid any attention to Snowfrid on her return, and the girl on her side seemed to find her thoughts quite as interesting as conversation. After a few minutes, she said that she was going to bed, and lighted a splinter at the embers. The firelight, as she bent, showed her bashful mouth to be smiling with the memory of kisses. She seemed to be walking in a blissful dream as she went lightly up the stairs.
What aroused Randvar, finally, was the consciousness that his foster-mother was moving with unnatural deliberation. Sitting up to look at her, he found that her gaze had become fixed upon the space beyond the fire, and she was lifting her arm from her knee to stretch it out in that direction.
“Look at that wolf yonder,” she said.