and Marche thought that he had never looked upon anything in all the world more pure and peaceful.
At noon the girl had not awakened. But something in John B. Marche had. He looked in horrified surprise at the decoys, then looked at Molly Herold; then he gazed in profound astonishment at Uncle Dudley, who made a cryptic remark to the wife of his bosom, and then tipped upside down.
Marche examined the sky and water so carefully that he did not see them; then, sideways, and with an increasing sensation of consternation, he looked again at the sleeping girl.
His was not even a friendly gaze, now; there was more than dawning
alarm in it—an irritated curiosity which grew more intense as the seconds throbbed out, absurdly timed by a most remarkable obligato from his heart.
He gazed stonily upon this stranger into whose life he had drifted only a week before, whose slumbers he felt that he was now unwarrantedly invading with a mental presumption that scared him; and yet, as often as he looked elsewhere, he looked back at her again, confused by the slowly dawning recognition of a fascination which he was utterly powerless to check or even control.
One thing was already certain; he wanted to know her, to learn from her own lips intimately about herself, about
her thoughts, her desires, her tastes, her aspirations—even her slightest fancies.
Absorbed, charmed by her quiet breathing, fascinated into immobility, he sat there gazing at her, trying to reconcile the steadily strengthening desire to know her with what he already knew of her—of this sleeping stranger, this shabby child of a poor man, dressed in the boots and shooting coat of that wretchedly poor man—his own superintendent, a sick man whom he had never even seen.
What manner of man could her father be—this man Herold—to have a child of this sort, this finely molded, fine-grained, delicate, exquisitely made