long seconds that elapsed before either spoke, he saw that she had swept her right hand behind her back, in a swift, instinctive effort to hide what it held. His self-possession returned. He had not been mistaken. He smiled at her apologetically.

"I beg your pardon," he said. "I'm afraid I frightened you."

"You did." She spoke tensely, the effect of overstrained nerves revealing itself in her low voice. "What do you mean by it? What are you doing here?"

Laurie's brilliant eyes were on hers as she spoke and held them steadily. Under his expression, one that few had seen on his face, her look of antagonism softened a little. He advanced slowly to the table between them.

"It will take a few minutes to explain," he said. Then, as she waited, he suddenly formed his plan and followed the good old Devon principle of going straight to the point.

"I live diagonally across the square," he said quietly, "and I can see into your window from one of mine. So it happened that just now I--I saw what you were going to do."

For an instant, she stood very still, looking at him, as if not quite taking in the meaning of his words. In the next, her face and even her neck crimsoned darkly as if under the rush of a wave of angry humiliation. When she spoke, her voice shook.

"You forget," she said, "that you have no right either to look into my room or to interfere with what you see there."

"I know," he told her, humbly, "and I beg your pardon again. The looking in was an accident, the merest chance, which I will explain to you later. The interference--well, I won't apologize for that. Surely you realize that it's--friendly."

For the first time, her eyes left his. She looked around the room as if uncertain what to do or say.

"Perhaps you mean it so," she muttered at last. "But I consider it--impertinent."

A change was taking place in her. The fire that had flamed up at his entrance was dying out, leaving her with the look of one who is cowed and almost beaten. Even her last words lacked assurance. Watching her in puzzled sympathy, Laurie for the first time wished himself older and wiser than he was. How could he handle a situation like this? Neither then nor later did he ask himself how he would have handled it on the stage.

 Prev. P 30/167 next