Starr had turned his back and was staring out of the window.  He might have been staring at a blank wall, for all he saw through the glass.  He was as pale as though he had just received some great physical shock, and he had his hands doubled up into fists, so that his knuckles were white.  His eyes were almost gray instead of hazel, and they were hard and hurt-looking.

Something in the set of his head and in the way his shoulders had stiffened told Helen May that things had gone wrong just in the last few minutes.  She gave him a second questioning glance, felt her heart go heavy while her brain seemed suddenly blank, and retreated to the kitchen.

Helen May, influenced it may be by Starr’s anxious thoughts of her, had dreamed of him; one of those vivid, intimate dreams that color our moods and our thoughts long after we awaken.  She had dreamed of being with him in the moonlight again; and Starr had sung again the love song of the desert, and had afterwards taken her in his arms and held her close, and kissed her twice lingeringly, looking deep into her eyes afterwards.

She had awakened with the thrill of those kisses still tingling her lips, so that she had covered her face with both hands in a sort of shamed joy that dreams could be so terribly real—­so terribly sweet, too.  And then, not fifteen minutes after she awoke, and while the dream yet clogged her reason, Starr himself had confronted her when she opened the door.  She would have been a remarkable young woman if she had not been flustered and nervous and inclined toward incoherent speech.

And now, it was perfectly idiotic to judge a man’s temper by the back of his neck, she told herself fiercely in the kitchen; perfectly idiotic, yet she did it.  She was impressed with his displeasure, his bitterness, with some change in him which she could not define to herself.  She wanted to cry, and she did not in the least know what there could possibly be to cry about.

Vic appeared, tousled and yawning and stupid as an owl in the sun.  He growled because the water bucket was empty and he must go to the spring, and he irritated Helen May to the point of wanting to shake him, when he went limping down the path.  She even called out sharply that he was limping with the wrong foot, and that he ought to tie a string around his lame ankle so he could remember which one it was.  Which made her feel more disagreeable than ever, because Vic really did have a bad ankle, as the swelling had proven when he went to bed last night.

Nothing seemed to go right, after that.  She scorched the bacon, and she caught her sleeve on the handle of the coffee pot and spilled about half the coffee, besides burning her wrist to a blister.  She broke a cup, but that had been cracked when she came, and at any other time she would not have been surprised at all, or jarred out of her calm.  She took out the muffins she had hurried to make for Starr, and they stuck to the tins and came out in ragged pieces, which is enough to drive any woman desperate, I suppose.  Vic slopped water on the floor when he came back with the bucket full, and the wind swooped a lot of sand into the kitchen, and she was certain the bacon would be gritty as well as burned.