Sheila went upstairs.  She took off her things, washed off the dust, and changed into the black-and-white barmaid’s costume, fastening the frilly apron, the cuffs, the delicate fichu with mechanical care.  She put on the silk stockings and the buckled shoes and the tiny cap.  Then she went into her sitting-room, chose the most dignified chair, folded her hands in her lap, and waited for Dickie.  Waiting, she looked out through the window and saw the glow fade from the snowy crest of The Hill.  The evening star let itself delicately down through the sweeping shadows of the earth from some mysterious fastness of invisibility.  The room was dim when Dickie’s knock made her turn her head.

“Come in.”

He appeared, shut the door without looking at her, then came unwillingly across the carpet and stopped at about three steps from her chair, standing with one hand in his pocket.  He had slicked down his hair with a wet brush and changed his suit.  It was the dark-blue serge he had worn at the dance five months before.  What those five months had been to Dickie, through what abasements and exaltations, furies and despairs he had traveled since he had looked up from Sheila’s slippered feet with his heart turned backward like a pilot’s wheel, was only faintly indicated in his face.  And yet the face gave Sheila a pang.  And, unsupported by anger, he was far from formidable, a mere youth.  Sheila wondered at her long and sustained persecution of him.  She smiled, her lips, her eyes, and her heart.

“Aren’t you going to sit down, Dickie?  This isn’t a school examination.”

“If it was,” said Dickie, with an uncertain attempt at ease, “I wouldn’t pass.”  He felt for a chair and got into it.  He caught a knee in his hand and looked about him.  “You’ve made the room awful pretty, Sheila.”

She had spent some of the rather large pay she drew upon coverings of French blue for the plush furniture, upon a dainty yellow porcelain tea-set, upon little oddments of decoration.  The wall-paper and carpet were inoffensive, the quietest probably in Millings, so that her efforts had met with some success.  There was a lounge with cushions, there were some little volumes, a picture of her father, a bowl of pink wild roses, a vase of vivid cactus flowers.  Some sketches in water-color—­Marcus’s most happy medium—­had been tacked up.  A piece of tapestry decorated the back of the chair Sheila had chosen.  In the dim light it all had an air of quiet richness.  It seemed a room transplanted to Millings from some finer soil.

Dickie looked at the tapestry because it was the nearest he dared come to looking at Sheila.  His hands and knees shook with the terrible beating of his heart.  It was not right, thought Dickie resentfully, that any feeling should take hold of a fellow and shake and terrify him so.  He threw himself back suddenly and folded his arms tight across his chest.

“You wanted to see me about something?” he asked.