The woman, sir, was looking at me.  Her chair was back to mine, close, and both our heads were down in the shadow under the edge of the table, with Fedderson clear over on the other side by the stove.  And there were her two eyes hunting mine between the spindles in the shadow.  You won’t believe me, sir, but I tell you I felt like jumping to my feet and running out of the room—­it was so queer.

I don’t know what her husband was praying about after that.  His voice didn’t mean anything, no more than the seas on the ledge away down there.  I went to work to count the canes in the seat again, but all my eyes were in the top of my head.  It got so I couldn’t stand it.  We were at the Lord’s prayer, saying it singsong together, when I had to look up again.  And there her two eyes were, between the spindles, hunting mine.  Just then all of us were saying, “Forgive us our trespasses—­” I thought of it afterward.

When we got up she was turned the other way, but I couldn’t help seeing her cheeks were red.  It was terrible.  I wondered if Fedderson would notice, though I might have known he wouldn’t—­not him.  He was in too much of a hurry to get at his Jacob’s-ladder, and then he had to tell me for the tenth time what the Inspector’d said that day about getting him another light—­Kingdom Come, maybe, he said.

I made some excuse or other and got away.  Once in the store-room, I sat down on my cot and stayed there a long time, feeling queerer than anything.  I read a chapter in the Bible, I don’t know why.  After I’d got my boots off I sat with them in my hands for as much as an hour, I guess, staring at the oil-tank and its lopsided shadow on the wall.  I tell you, sir, I was shocked.  I was only twenty-two remember, and I was shocked and horrified.

And when I did turn in, finally, I didn’t sleep at all well.  Two or three times I came to, sitting straight up in bed.  Once I got up and opened the outer door to have a look.  The water was like glass, dim, without a breath of wind, and the moon just going down.  Over on the black shore I made out two lights in a village, like a pair of eyes watching.  Lonely?  My, yes!  Lonely and nervous.  I had a horror of her, sir.  The dinghy-boat hung on its davits just there in front of the door, and for a minute I had an awful hankering to climb into it, lower away, and row off, no matter where.  It sounds foolish.

Well, it seemed foolish next morning, with the sun shining and everything as usual—­Fedderson sucking his pen and wagging his head over his eternal “log,” and his wife down in the rocker with her head in the newspaper, and her breakfast work still waiting.  I guess that jarred it out of me more than anything else—­sight of her slouched down there, with her stringy, yellow hair and her dusty apron and the pale back of her neck, reading the Society Notes. Society Notes!  Think of it!  For the first time since I came to Seven Brothers I wanted to laugh.