n the last
few minutes. She gave him a second questioning glance, felt her
heart go heavy while her brain seemed suddenly blank, and retreated
to the kitchen.

Helen May, influenced it may be by Starr's anxious thoughts of her, had
dreamed of him; one of those vivid, intimate dreams that color our moods
and our thoughts long after we awaken. She had dreamed of being with him
in the moonlight again; and Starr had sung again the love song of the
desert, and had afterwards taken her in his arms and held her close, and
kissed her twice lingeringly, looking deep into her eyes afterwards.

She had awakened with the thrill of those kisses still tingling her lips,
so that she had covered her face with both hands in a sort of shamed joy
that dreams could be so terribly real--so terribly sweet, too. And then,
not fifteen minutes after she awoke, and while the dream yet clogged her
reason, Starr himself had confronted her when she opened the door. She
would have been a remarkable young woman if she had not been flustered
and nervous and inclined toward incoherent speech.

And now, it was perfectly idiotic to judge a man's temper by the back of
his neck, she told herself fiercely in the kitchen; perfectly idiotic,
yet she did it. She was impressed with his displeasure, his bitterness,
with some change in him which she could not define to herself. She wanted
to cry, and she did not in the least know what there could possibly be to
cry about.

Vic appeared, tousled and yawning and stupid as an owl in the sun. He
growled because the water bucket was empty and he must go to the spring,
and he irritated Helen May to the point of wanting to shake him, when he
went limping down the path. She even called out sharply that he was
limping with the wrong foot, and that he ought to tie a string around his
lame ankle so he could remember which one it was. Which made her feel
more disagreeable than ever, because Vic really did have a bad ankle, as
the swelling had proven when he went to bed last night.

Nothing seemed to go right, after that. She scorched the bacon, and she
caught her sleeve on the handle of the coffee pot and spilled about half
the coffee, besides burning her wrist to a blister. She broke a cup, but
that had been cracked when she came, and at any other time she would not
have been surprised at all, or jarred out of her calm. She took out the
muffins she had hurried to make for Starr, and they stuck to the tins and
came out