He struck a match and presently a clean blue flame grew up beneath it.
He lifted the lid and filled the small pot, thereby exposed, with water from the bucket on a bench. Then he delved in one of the big trunks against the farther wall and brought out a little tin of cakes, such as one could buy in any city of the world.
All this was absorbing to the girl in the big chair, who watched with grave eyes. And Kenset kept up a running stream of gay talk all the time. He wanted to make her at ease, to cover the thought of the strain between them, and how much he wanted to drive from his own mind the knowledge that this sweet and wholesome creature was a potential murderer, he did not know. From a can he measured chocolate. From a pan somewhere outdoors he brought milk. Sugar he added carefully as a woman, and presently he spread between 146 them on the table a small repast that was strange to this girl of the wilderness.
He watched her with appraising eyes and saw that there was in her no consciousness of the unusual. She might have sat at meat in the big room of the Holding for all the flutter there was in her.
He told her somewhat of himself, of his life in the East, but he was careful not to ask about Lost Valley, to make mention of the circumstances that had brought her to his door. And so an hour passed as if it had been a bagatelle. The afternoon was waning when Tharon rose swiftly and abruptly terminated this first visit inside his home of any Lost Valley denizen.
“Bring out your picture,” she said decisively, “I’ll help you hang it, an’ then I must go home.”
So Kenset dived once more into the mysterious recesses of the trunk and this time brought out a thing of rare beauty and value, a large tapestry, some four by six feet in size, a wonderful thing of soft and deathless hues, of cunning distances, of Greek figures and leaning trees, of sea-line so faint as to be almost lost in the misty skies.
“Oh!” said Tharon Last with an intake of her breath, “Oh, where do they make such things?”
“Far on the other side of the world,” said 147 Kenset gently, pleased with the wonder in her wide eyes, the evident and quick realization of beauty.
She whirled from it and glanced quickly at the two spaces on the rugged walls.