"The thirteenth move. Didn't I _say_ it would be unlucky!"
Ikey had fled to the garden, letter in hand, to review the situation.
The low clouds threatened rain. But what did that matter? The house
stifled her with its large, low, mannish rooms and continued reminder of
Arthur Hammond; and she had to think--think--think everything out from
the very beginning.
That first evening--when she wakened in the dusk at his side in the
automobile and stared bewildered at the dim outline of the low, rambling
brown house tucked away among shrubbery under a load of vines--how quick
he had been to reassure her, to explain that a friend of his, who had
expected to come here with his bride, had had to go to Mexico instead
and had asked him to occupy the bungalow until their return. A woman and
a Chinaman went with the place; and she would have the run of a large
garden. She could get rested there; and he could go to and from town
every day.
And the days that followed--how careful he had been; how matter-of-fact
and unemotional; never touching her; never making any sudden motion
towards her; never referring to that short ten minutes at the
clergyman's; never going near the two rooms the respectable English
housekeeper had conducted her to that first evening.
"Almost as though he were trying to tame a bird," she had thought half
whimsically, after the first days, when the feeling of weariness and
fright had worn down and a great relief and great thankfulness had taken
its place, that she should never see the boarding-house again with its
sneering, insulting landlady, or the office where that man with the
eager, shifty, cruel little eyes held rule.
And so she had set herself about it, resolutely, though bewildered, to
be an anchor to this big, unemotional young man who had so suddenly come
out of the background of her existence and was occupying all possible
space immediately behind the footlights.
She did not at all know what an anchor did, or said, or how it acted.
But the very perplexity for some reason or other sent her spirits
sky-high. And she pottered about the garden with him, and whizzed about
the country in the automobile,--it belonged to the same friend who
wanted him to look after the place,--and poked about the queer, rambling
house, content to see no one else and talk to no one else and amazed at
herself that this should be so.
Only once had he made any reference to their situation, when he
suggested that it might be as well under the circumstances for her to
call him Arthur.
"I shall never call you Arthur. Never," she told him hotly. "I loathe
the name. Always have. It sounds so deadly respectable."
"You don't care for respectability?" His tone was _so_ affable.