“What is it?” he asked. “What do you want?”
Her head turned and although her face was a blackness he could feel her eyes studying him, fondling his features with a glance that was both tired and expectant.
“I was tired,” she answered in a muffled voice.
That seemed to explain something and he continued his advance until he was beside her. She drew back slightly into her corner of the embrasure and he sat down on the cold crumbling bricks. He said:
“You mean … of loneliness?”
Her shoulders quivered a trifle. She did not need to answer that. Her movement dislodged a fragment of brick and it dropped with a sharp plop into the millpond. Dreeme started nervously at the sound.
“Why were you spying on me through the stone wall today?” she asked suddenly, and then went on, not waiting for an answer. “I knew you would come. You mustn’t loiter about the house, though. It isn’t safe. He would be sure to find it out.”
Dreeme felt like a drowning man, and he made a valiant effort to save himself.
“I had business Leeminster way,” he replied in an uncertain tone. “I just happened that way. I wasn’t spying, I. …”
“You needn’t lie,” she returned coolly. She put her hand on his knee. She said:
“You are the first young man I have talked to alone for years.”
The electric touch of her fingers filled Dreeme with a nervous excitement. He fumbled vaguely for words, but his mind was like a great empty sack. Explore as he might there was nothing there.
“He keeps me shut up,” she went on. “I have to … but no matter.”
Dreeme still sought blindly for words. Her voice and her vaguely-outlined face were dead weights on his intelligence. He could not rise above them or push them aside.
“I like you,” she said. “Does that sound silly? Let it. I liked you the minute I saw you.”
“I think … I mean …” began Dreeme.
“You were like a boy with the weary lines of a man’s face impossibly stamped on you,” she remarked slowly. Her eyes studied him a moment. She asked softly:
“Are you afraid?”
His silence, complete and emphatic, was the mute answer to her question. In the milky light he could see that she was almost smiling.
“Don’t be afraid,” she said as though she were speaking to a child.
“I’m not afraid,” replied Dreeme with an effort. “What is there to be afraid of? I don’t understand. That’s all.”
Her face was level with his, and she looked at him for a moment steadily, her dark eyes under their heavy lids full of a vague surmise.
“How long have you been here?” she asked presently.
“Two years,” answered Dreeme much as though he were a schoolchild being examined.
“So long?” she murmured. “You see how ignorant I am. Men pass outside my window and I never see them.”
Dreeme, in spite of his confusion, doubted that.
“What do you know about me?” she proceeded. There was a faint breathlessness in the question.
“Practically nothing,” he said.
She sighed, and it seemed to Dreeme that she sighed in relief.
“We are not children, are we?” she asked irrelevantly.
Dreeme shook his head.
“It has been so long since I conversed with anyone that I have almost lost the use of words,” she said half to herself. “Yet words were once my favorite playthings. I would shape them into all sorts of patterns.”
She removed her hand from his knee for an instant and then put it back. It seemed to Dreeme as though there had been a brief flaw in the electric current that was pouring into him and which so unsteadied him.
“Be silent, then, and let me talk,” she went on. “I need to say things. I am tired of talking to myself and inanimate objects, tired of reading, tired of working, tired of listening to things that I do not much care about any more.”
She paused for a moment but Dreeme said nothing.
“You see,” she said. “I needed someone.” Her hand closed about his wrist softly. “I needed you. I had not been in the room more than a minute before I realized that you were that sensitive type about. … Do you remember looking at me? Weren’t you trying to say something to me, trying to say it without words?”
Her speech had suddenly become a husky caress. She leaned forward. She murmured in an almost inaudible voice:
“Say it now.”
Dreeme fumbled for words. Had he desired to convey any message to her? He could not find it in the welter of his mind.
“I was wondering,” he stuttered. “I mean, it seemed strange to find that room full of books, that curious man, and … you.”
He was suddenly aware that he did not desire this relationship between them to establish itself too quickly and too firmly upon a basis of mystical understanding. It was too silly. Two strangers did not reveal themselves so nakedly to one another. He clutched eagerly at the tattered cloak of his New England reticence. She did not appear to understand that he was attempting to convey a polite snub, a discreet hint, as it were, to resume the formal disguises of casual acquaintances, but her hand slipped from his wrist. Dreeme almost breathed with relief.
“It is good to be away from that house and to be able to talk as I wish,” she proceeded. “It is an evil house. It is dominated by an evil man.”
Dreeme said nothing. He sat gazing at the millpond in a phlegmatic manner. Her dark eyes narrowed a trifle as she watched him.
“I, too, am evil,” she added.
Her tone was matter-of-fact, as though she were stating a thing already understood. At the same time, there was an implied challenge in it. Dreeme felt that he should say something.
“I don’t think you are evil,” he protested. There was but little conviction in his voice.
“All that
