The man at her side turned and looked at her. His face no longer wore its placidly and conventionally polite expression.
IV
"The thirteenth move. Didn't I say it would be unlucky!"
Ikey had fled to the garden, letter in hand, to review the situation. The low clouds threatened rain. But what did that matter? The house stifled her with its large, low, mannish rooms and continued reminder of Arthur Hammond; and she had to think—think—think everything out from the very beginning.
That first evening—when she wakened in the dusk at his side in the automobile and stared bewildered at the dim outline of the low, rambling brown house tucked away among shrubbery under a load of vines—how quick he had been to reassure her, to explain that a friend of his, who had expected to come here with his bride, had had to go to Mexico instead and had asked him to occupy the bungalow until their return. A woman and a Chinaman went with the place; and she would have the run of a large garden. She could get rested there; and he could go to and from town every day.
And the days that followed—how careful he had been; how matter-of-fact and unemotional; never touching her; never making any sudden motion towards her; never referring to that short ten minutes at the clergyman's; never going near the two rooms the respectable English housekeeper had conducted her to that first evening.
"Almost as though he were trying to tame a bird," she had thought half whimsically, after the first days, when the feeling of weariness and fright had worn down and a great relief and great thankfulness had taken its place, that she should never see the boarding-house again with its sneering, insulting landlady, or the office where that man with the eager, shifty, cruel little eyes held rule.
And so she had set herself about it, resolutely, though bewildered, to be an anchor to this big, unemotional young man who had so suddenly come out of the background of her existence and was occupying all possible space immediately behind the footlights.
She did not at all know what an anchor did, or said, or how it acted. But the very perplexity for some reason or other sent her spirits sky-high. And she pottered about the garden with him, and whizzed about the country in the automobile,—it belonged to the same friend who wanted him to look after the place,—and poked about the queer, rambling house, content to see no one else and talk to no one else and amazed at herself that this should be so.
Only once had he made any reference to their situation, when he suggested that it might be as well under the circumstances for her to call him Arthur.