The following day he was still absent. She assumed that it was nervousness occasioned by her queer surroundings made her look around whenever she heard a step behind her. Where was he? Where had that look carried him? If he were in trouble, was there no one to help him?
The third day she did an unpremeditated thing. The man in the skull cap had been showing her something about the copy. As he was leaving, she asked: “Is the man who sits at the next table coming back?”
“Oh yes,” he replied grimly, “he'll be back.”
“Because,” she went on, “if he wasn't, I thought I would take his shears. These hurt my fingers.”
He made the exchange for her—and after that things went better.
He did return late the next morning. After he had taken his place he looked over at her and smiled. He looked sick and shaken—as if something that knew no mercy had taken hold of him and wrung body and soul.
“You have been ill?” she asked, with timid solicitude.
“Oh no,” he replied, rather shortly.
He was quiet all that day, but the next day they talked about the work, laughed together over funny definitions they found. She felt that he could tell many interesting things about himself, if he cared to.
As the days went on he did tell some of those things—out of the way places where he had worked, queer people whom he had known. It seemed that words came to him as gifts, came freely, happily, pleased, perhaps, to be borne by so sympathetic a voice. And there was another thing about him. He seemed always to know just what she was trying to say; he never missed the unexpressed. That made it easy to say things to him; there seemed a certain at-homeness between his thought and hers. She accounted for her interest in him by telling herself she had never known any one like that before. Now Harold, the boy whom she knew best out at the university, why one had to say things to Harold to make him understand! And Harold never left one wondering—wondering what he had meant by that smile, what he had been going to say when he started to say something and stopped, wondering what it was about his face that one could not understand. Harold never could claim as his the hour after he had left her, and was one ever close to anyone with whom one did not spend some of the hours of absence? She began to see that hours spent together when apart were the most intimate hours of all.