was speaking. All the loneliness of long, lonely days clamored for speech, all the pent-up resentment choked for words.
The lady listened at first with polite but conscious sympathy; then she bent forward more and more eagerly, but always with restraint, with that mastery of body and soul that never for a moment slipped away, and yet with so evident a sympathy and comprehension that it set Matthew’s head swimming. She swept him almost imperiously with her eyes—those great wide orbs of darkening light. His own eyes lifted and fell before them; lifted and fell, until at Jast he looked past them and talked to the tall green and black oaks.
And yet there was never anything personal in her all-sweeping glance or anything self-conscious in the form that bent toward him, She never seemed in the slightest way conscious of herself. She arranged nothing, glanced at no detail of her dress, smoothed no wisp of hair. She seemed at once unconscious of her beauty and charm, and at the same time assuming it as a fact, but of no especial importance. She had no little feminine ways; she used her eyes apparently only for seeing, yet seemed to see all.
Matthew had the feeling that her steady, full, radiant gaze that enveloped and almost burned him, saw not him but the picture he was painting and the thing that the picture meant. He warmed with such an audience and painted with clean, sure lines. Only once or twice did she interrupt, and when he had ended, she still sat full-faced, flooding him with the startling beauty of her eyes. Her hands clasped and unclasped slowly, her lips were slightly parted, the curve of her young bosom rose and fell.
“And you ran away!” she said musingly. Matthew winced and started to explain, but she continued. “Singular,” she said. “How singular that I should meet you; and today.” There Was no coquetry in her tone. It was evidently not of him, the hero, of whom she was thinking, but of him, the group, the fact, the whole drama.
“And you are two—three millions?” she asked.
“Ten or twelve,” he answered.
“You ran away,” she repeated, half in meditation.
“What else could I do?” he demanded impulsively. “Cringe and crawl?”
“Of course the Negroes have no hospitals?”
