“But I don’t want it in my eyes,” I replied dreamily.  “I haven’t any idea what came over me.  It was the shoes, I think:  the left one is a red-hot torture.”  I was sitting by that time and looking across into her face.

Never before or since have I fainted, but I would do it joyfully, a dozen times a day, if I could waken again to the blissful touch of soft fingers on my face, the hot ecstasy of coffee spilled by those fingers down my neck.  There was a thrill in every tone of her voice that morning.  Before long my loyalty to McKnight would step between me and the girl he loved:  life would develop new complexities.  In those early hours after the wreck, full of pain as they were, there was nothing of the suspicion and distrust that came later.  Shorn of our gauds and baubles, we were primitive man and woman, together:  our world for the hour was the deserted farm-house, the slope of wheat-field that led to the road, the woodland lot, the pasture.

We breakfasted together across the homely table.  Our cheerfulness, at first sheer reaction, became less forced as we ate great slices of bread from the granny oven back of the house, and drank hot fluid that smelled like coffee and tasted like nothing that I have ever swallowed.  We found cream in stone jars, sunk deep in the chill water of the spring house.  And there were eggs, great yellow-brown ones,—­a basket of them.

So, like two children awakened from a nightmare, we chattered over our food:  we hunted mutual friends, we laughed together at my feeble witticisms, but we put the horror behind us resolutely.  After all, it was the hat with the green ribbons that brought back the strangeness of the situation.

All along I had had the impression that Alison West was deliberately putting out of her mind something that obtruded now and then.  It brought with it a return of the puzzled expression that I had surprised early in the day, before the wreck.  I caught it once, when, breakfast over, she was tightening the sling that held the broken arm.  I had prolonged the morning meal as much as I could, but when the wooden clock with the pink roses on the dial pointed to half after ten, and the mother with the duplicate youngsters had not come back, Miss West made the move I had dreaded.

“If we are to get into Baltimore at all we must start,” she said, rising.  “You ought to see a doctor as soon as possible.”

“Hush,” I said warningly.  “Don’t mention the arm, please; it is asleep now.  You may rouse it.”

“If I only had a hat,” she reflected.  “It wouldn’t need to be much of one, but—­” She gave a little cry and darted to the corner.  “Look,” she said triumphantly, “the very thing.  With the green streamers tied up in a bow, like this—­do you suppose the child would mind?  I can put five dollars or so here—­that would buy a dozen of them.”

It was a queer affair of straw, that hat, with a round crown and a rim that flopped dismally.  With a single movement she had turned it up at one side and fitted it to her head.  Grotesque by itself, when she wore it it was a thing of joy.