There was disclosed beyond this an apartment
of a sort with which she was more familiar, a spacious studio with its
large window giving to the north. In the clear light her eyes ran
quickly over its details: the chinked logs that made its walls, the huge
stone fireplace on one side, the broad couch along the opposite wall,
covered with another of the vivid Navajo weaves, the skins of bear and
lynx and cougar on the stained floor, the easel before the window, a
canvas in place on it; the branching antlers over the fireplace,
contrived into a gun rack; a tall, roughly made cabinet, its single
shelf littered with half-squeezed tubes of paint, a daubed palette, and
a red-glazed jar from which brushes protruded. Above the couch were some
shelves of books, and between it and the fireplace was a table strewn
with papers, magazines, a drawing board with a sheet of paper tacked to
it, and half a dozen sharpened pencils.

He indicated the couch. "It will be a good thing for you to rest a
little," he said. She seated herself with a smile of assent. He rashly
began to arrange the pillows for her, but left off in a sudden
consciousness of his temerity, withdrawing a few paces to regard her.
He was still apprehensive, but his boy's eyes were full of delight,
amusement, curiosity, and, more than all, of a wistfulness like that of
a dumb creature. He stepped to the door for the pitcher of water and
glass that Ben now brought.

She had studied him coolly as he spoke--the negligent out-of-doors
carriage of the figure, not without a kind of free animal grace, the
grace of a trampling horse rather than that of soft-going panthers. The
floor boards reechoed to his careless, rattling tread, and occasionally,
his attention being drawn to this reverberation, he was at great pains
for a moment to go on tiptoe. He was well set up, with a sufficient
length of thigh. Mrs. Laithe approved of this, for, in her opinion, many
a goodly masculine torso in these times goes for nothing because of a
shortness of leg. His hair was a lightish brown and so straight that a
lock was prone to come out behind and point uncompromisingly toward
distant things. This impropriety he wholly disregarded, whereas the more
civilized man would have borne the fault in mind and remembered
occasionally to apply a restrictive hand. His face was a long, browned
square, with gray eyes, so imbedded under the brow that they had a look
of fierceness. His lips showed only a narrow