He did not look at her steadily.  His gaze was in the red glow of the fire a good deal.  She talked, and he answered in monosyllables.  When he looked at her, his eyes glowed with the hot red light reflected from the fire, Live coals seemed to burn in them.

In spite of the heat a little shiver ran down her spine.

Silence became too significant.  She was afraid of it.  So she talked, persistently, at times a little hysterically.  Her memory was good.  If she liked a piece of poetry, she could learn it by reading it over a few times.  So, in her desperation, she “spoke pieces” to this man whose face was a gray mask, just as the girls had done at her school in Winnipeg.

Often, at night camps, she had recited for her father.  If she had no dramatic talent, at least she had a sweet, clear voice, an earnestness that never ranted, and some native or acquired skill in handling inflections.

“Do you like Shakespeare?” she asked.  “My father’s very fond of him.  I know parts of several of the plays.  ‘Henry V’ now.  That’s good.  There’s a bit where he’s talking to his soldiers before they fight the French.  Would you like that?”

“Go on,” he said gruffly, sultry eyes on the fire.

With a good deal of spirit she flung out the gallant lines.  He began to watch her, vivid, eager, so pathetically anxious to entertain him with her small stock of wares.

  “But, if it be a sin to covet honor,
  I am the most offending soul alive.”

There was about her a quality very fine and taking.  He caught it first in those two lines, and again when her full young voice swelled to English Harry’s prophecy.

  “And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
  From this day to the ending of the world,
  But we in it shall be remembered. 
  We few, we happy few, we band of brothers: 
  For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
  Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
  This day shall gentle his condition: 
  And gentlemen in England now abed
  Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here,
  And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
  That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.”

As he watched her, old memories stirred in him.  He had come from a good family in the Western Reserve, where he had rough-and-tumbled up through the grades into High School.  After a year here he had gone to a Catholic School, Sacred Heart College, and had studied for the priesthood.  He recalled his mother, a gentle, white-haired old lady, with fond pride in him; his father, who had been the soul of honor.  By some queer chance she had lit on the very lines that he had learned from the old school reader and recited before an audience the last day prior to vacation.

He woke from his reveries to discover that she was giving him Tennyson, that fragment from “Guinevere” when Arthur tells her of the dream her guilt has tarnished.  And as she spoke there stirred in him the long-forgotten aspirations of his youth.