I was lonely too; I didn't know a soul. A queer way to make a friend!”
As he stepped into the room, the light from the windows fell on him; he was dressed in the uniform of an American officer.
“Which are you?” he asked. “I've heard only your voice as yet. I'll do anything I can to help.”
The little lady held out her hand, but her face was still in shadow. It was a very tiny hand. “It's good of you to be willing to stay with us,” she said gratefully.
At that point their conversation languished. The circumstances were so unprecedented that they were at a loss what to say or how to act. It was he who broke the awkward silence: “We ought to be able to rouse this fire with a little effort.” He bent over it, trying to pull it together. “We need more coal. If you'll excuse me and won't be frightened while I'm gone, I'll run down and see what I can forage.”
It seemed a long time that he was gone—so long that she had begun to be afraid that he'd taken his chance to slip out. She wouldn't have blamed him. In the last two years, since she'd been by herself, she'd become used to men doing things like that. She had ceased to bank overmuch on masculine chivalry. Few men had leisure to expend on a woman, however charming and beautiful, whose children had always to be included in the friendship.
When she had made quite sure that he was no more chivalrous than other men, she heard him laboriously returning. He came in carrying a scuttle in one hand and some bundles of wood in the other. “And now we'll pull down the blinds,” he said, “and make a blaze and get her going.”
On his knees before the hearth he started to work, ramming paper between the bars, piling sticks criss-cross and using his cheeks as bellows. In the intervals between his exertions he chatted, “I'm no great shakes at house-work. You mustn't watch me too closely or laugh at me. I'll do better than this when I've been at the Front, I guess. Are these your kiddies?... I suppose your husband's over there, where I'm going?”
“He was.”
“Oh, so you've got him back! You're lucky. Is he wounded or has he got a staff job in England?”
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