I do not think that she meant to pass by the hotel that evening. I do not believe that most of us, in such moments, are actuated any more by motive than we are directed by discretion. Nevertheless, when the clutch of her emotions had enough loosened from her throat to permit her to take account of her whereabouts, the time, and the place, it was a quarter after six by the town-clock; Mary was just before the plate-glass window where the drummers sat, and, only a minute later, the stranger of the morning was again at her side.
"Von't you chust say that you're not mad vith me?" he was asking.
She was so frightened that she was conscious of no other definite sensation, much less of any ordered thought or opinion; but she looked fairly at him, and of what she saw she was immediately fully aware.
He was a young man, but the sort of young man that might be anywhere from nineteen to thirty-two, because he had the figure and the face of the former age and the eyes and the expression of the latter. The hair on his head was black and curly; though his hands were not the working-hands with which Mary was best acquainted, they were almost covered with a lighter down of the same growth; and through the pale olive of his sorely clean-shaven cheeks shone the blue-black hint of a wiry beard fighting for freedom. His lips were thick when he did not smile and thin when he did, with teeth very white; and his gray glance had a penetrating calculation about it that made the girl instinctively draw her coat together and button it.
To his speech she could pay, just then, scarcely any attention, except to feel that its quick, thick quality, and its ictus on the vowels, denoted the foreigner; but his clothes were a marvel that would not be denied. His coat and trousers of green were cut in the extreme of a fashion that was new to her; his brown plush hat was turned far down on one side and far up on the other; his waistcoat, of purple striped by white, was held by large mother-of-pearl buttons, and his shoes, long and pointed, were the color of lemons.
Impulsively she had refused an answer to his first words; but the young man was a member of the persistent race, and speedily followed the first speech with a second.
"Chust say the vord," he pleaded, "und I von' bother you no more. I only vanted to make myself square vith you."
Mary hesitated. Something, she knew, she feared, but whether it was the man, herself, or the habit of obedience she could not tell. He was polite, he was respectful; he came, it was clear, from a happier world than her own—and, as against her own she was now in open revolt, a certain parley with this visitor from an alien orb seemed likely to constitute a fitting declaration of independence. Conditions had worked upon her to desperation, and the same conditions, little as she guessed it, had, under the mask of chance, inevitably provided this avenue of protest.
"Oh," she said, "I'm not mad at you, if that's what you want to know."
"I'm glad of that," he easily answered, as they turned, quite naturally, away from the main street. "But I thought you gonsidered me fresh."