Evidently the lack of head covering had troubled her, for she was elated at her find.  She left me, scrawling a note of thanks and pinning it with a bill to the table-cloth, and ran up-stairs to the mirror and the promised soap and water.

I did not see her when she came down.  I had discovered a bench with a tin basin outside the kitchen door, and was washing, in a helpless, one-sided way.  I felt rather than saw that she was standing in the door-way, and I made a final plunge into the basin.

“How is it possible for a man with only a right hand to wash his left ear?” I asked from the roller towel.  I was distinctly uncomfortable:  men are more rigidly creatures of convention than women, whether they admit it or not.  “There is so much soap on me still that if I laugh I will blow bubbles.  Washing with rain-water and home-made soap is like motoring on a slippery road.  I only struck the high places.”

Then, having achieved a brilliant polish with the towel, I looked at the girl.

She was leaning against the frame of the door, her face perfectly colorless, her breath coming in slow, difficult respirations.  The erratic hat was pinned to place, but it had slid rakishly to one side.  When I realized that she was staring, not at me, but past me to the road along which we had come, I turned and followed her gaze.  There was no one in sight:  the lane stretched dust white in the sun,—­no moving figure on it, no sign of life.

CHAPTER X

MISS WEST’S REQUEST

The surprising change in her held me speechless.  All the animation of the breakfast table was gone:  there was no hint of the response with which, before, she had met my nonsensical sallies.  She stood there, white-lipped, unsmiling, staring down the dusty road.  One hand was clenched tight over some small object.  Her eyes dropped to it from the distant road, and then closed, with a quick, indrawn breath.  Her color came back slowly.  Whatever had caused the change, she said nothing.  She was anxious to leave at once, almost impatient over my deliberate masculine way of getting my things together.  Afterward I recalled that I had wanted to explore the barn for a horse and some sort of a vehicle to take us to the trolley, and that she had refused to allow me to look.  I remembered many things later that might have helped me, and did not.  At the time, I was only completely bewildered.  Save the wreck, the responsibility for which lay between Providence and the engineer of the second section, all the events of that strange morning were logically connected; they came from one cause, and tended unerringly to one end.  But the cause was buried, the end not yet in view.

Not until we had left the house well behind did the girl’s face relax its tense lines.  I was watching her more closely than I had realized, for when we had gone a little way along the road she turned to me almost petulantly.  “Please don’t stare so at me,” she said, to my sudden confusion.  “I know the hat is dreadful.  Green always makes me look ghastly.”