Page:Arthur Stringer - Twin Tales.djvu/76

66 vague and small as the worry of a mouse behind midnight wainscotting, began to nibble at her heart. For that enclosing big hand was holding her own longer than need be, that small horripilating disturbance of her hair was something more than accidental. The small nibble of trouble grew into something disturbing, something almost momentous, something to be stopped without loss of time.

She got up sidewise from her chair, with a half-twist of the torso that was an inheritance from her basketball days. It freed her without obvious effort from all contact with the over-intimate leaning figure. She even retained possession of the crayon-pencil, which she put down beside her Nile-green brush-bowl after crossing the room to the blackwooded console between the two windows.

"I guess that will about do us for to-day, won't it?" she said in her quiet and slightly reedy voice as she proceeded, with deluding grave impersonality, to open one of the windows.