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The section of burl was gone, and this argued that the question of spite had been purely a matter of secondary consideration. Evidently, Bryce reasoned, someone had desired that burl redwood greatly, and that someone had not been Jules Rondeau, since a woods- boss would not be likely to spend five minutes of his leisure time in consideration of the beauties of a burl table-top or panel.
She wiped up the white oilcloth table-top with a capable and soapy hand. The heat and bustle of the little kitchen seemed to work some miraculous change in her. Her eyes brightened. Her lips smiled. Once, Emma McChesney and Ethel Morrissey exchanged covert looks when they heard her crooning one of those tuneless chants that women hum when they wring out dishcloths in soapy water.
All the while the French battery kept on firing slowly, then again rapidly, their cracks trilling off like the drum of knuckles on a table-top. Another effort to locate one of the guns before we started back to Paris failed. Speeding on, we had again a glimpse of the landscape toward Noyon, sprinkled with shell-bursts.
The girl spoke rapidly, with her eyes upon the face of MacNair. So absorbed was she that she did not see the slim fingers of Lapierre steal softly across the table-top and extract two tablets from the little pile failed also to see the swift motion with which those fingers dropped the tablets into a porcelain cup, across the rim of which rested a silver spoon.
In reply she rose and stood drumming lightly with her fingers on the table-top. "'Daughter am I in my mother's house, but Mistress in mine own," she quoted. Hamilton Burton took several turns back and forth across the floor. The whole situation was surprising and intolerable.
"But hang it all, Brentwick!" expostulated Kirkwood, ashamed and contrite, but worked upon by desperate apprehension; "I didn't mean that, but " "Would you have bullets flying when she is near?" demanded Brentwick scathingly. Hastily he slipped the revolver upon a little shelf beneath the table-top.
"My hat and coat?" he said to Lilly. Lilly, not very tall, stood on tiptoe. Then he climbed on a chair and looked round. Then he squeezed past the crowd. Aaron followed. On the other side of the crowd excited angry men were wrestling over overcoats that were mixed up with a broken marble table-top. Aaron spied his own black hat under the sofa near the wall.
Then, little by little, his great shoulders in the vividly checkered coat began to sag they slumped downward-until his head was bowed and his face lay hidden in the long arms crooked limply asprawl across the table-top. Once more he spoke aloud, hours later. "They didn't want me," he repeated dully. "Not even for the work I could do!"
The stocky, grizzle-haired man in the centre was a plain-clothes man from headquarters, named Barlow; at the lower end of the table Reddy Curley and Haines, his partner, faced each other, Curley drumming indifferently with his fingers on the table-top, Haines scowling and chewing his lower lip, a certain coarse brutality in both their faces that was neither pleasant nor inviting; but it was the white-haired old man, bent of form, standing at the head of the table, upon whom Jimmie Dale's eyes lingered.
For his face, she had seen that the smooth sheath of satisfied self-absorption, which had once overlain it like the hard veneer on a table-top, had been scorched away as in a baptism by fire; from which all that was best in it had come out at once strengthened and chastened. And she thought that the shining quality of honesty in his face must be such as to strike strangers on the street.
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