CHAPTER IX

UNIVERSAL ATTRIBUTES

Afterward Thompson could never quite determine what prompted him to follow Sophie Carr when he saw her go down toward the creek bank.  He was on his way to Carr’s house, driven thither by pure pressure of loneliness, born of three days’ solitary communion within the limits of his own shack.  He wanted to hear a human voice again.  And it was a vagrant, unaccountable impulse that sent him after Sophie instead of directing him straight to Carr’s living room, where her father would probably be sitting, pipe in mouth, book in hand.

He hurried with long strides after Sophie.  She dipped below the sloping bank before he came up, and when he came noiselessly down to the grassy bank she stood leaning against a tree, gazing at the sluggish flow of Lone Moose.

He had seen her in moods that varied from feminine pettishness to the teasingly mischievous.  But he had never seen her in quite the same pitch of spirits that caught his attention as soon as he reached her side.

There was something bubbling within her, some repressed excitement that kindled a glow in her gray eyes, kept a curiously happy smile playing about her lips.

And that magnetic something that drew the heart out of Thompson, afflicting him with a maddening surge of impulses, had never functioned so strongly.

“What is it?” he asked abruptly.  “You seem—­you look—­”

He stopped short.  It was not what he meant to say.  He tried to avoid the intimately personal when he was with her.  He knew the danger of those sweet familiarities—­to himself.  But he had blurted out the question before he was aware.  He was standing so close to her that a little whirling breeze blew a strand of her yellow hair across his face.  That tenuous contact made him quiver, gave him a queer intoxicating thrill.

“Does it show so plainly as that?” she smiled.  “It’s a secret.  A really wonderful secret.  I’m just bursting to talk about it, but I mustn’t.  Talking might break the spell.  Do you—­along with your other naive beliefs—­believe in spells, Mr. Thompson?”

“Yes,” he answered simply.  “In yours.”

Her eyes danced.  She laughed softly, deep in her throat, like a meadow lark in spring.

“That’s the first time I ever knew you to indulge in irony,” she said.

“It isn’t irony,” he answered moodily.  “It’s the honest truth.”

“Poor man,” she said gaily.  “I’d be flattered to death to think a simple backwoods maiden could make such a profound impression on a young man from the city—­but it isn’t so.”

She turned her head sidewise, like a saucy bird, regarding him with mock gravity, a mischievous sparkle in her eyes.  Mr. Thompson had a long arm and he stood close to her, tantalizingly close.  She was smiling.  Her lips parted redly over white, even teeth, and as Thompson bent that moody somber gaze on her, her breath seemed to come suddenly a little faster, making her round breast flutter—­and a faint tinge of pink stole up to color the soft whiteness of her neck, up into the smooth round of her cheeks.