Page:The Star in the Window.pdf/344

334 Looking straight into those eyes, Nathan said, "When I was a boy I never knew what speckled prizes were hidden away in the brown pools till I fished them."

Reba gave a nervous little laugh. "Now I know it's you," she exclaimed, "talking that funny way I don't understand—like a poet."

"It's you that makes me talk that way," said Nathan gravely.

It was eleven o'clock when he left Reba that night at the door of the hotel where she had taken a room. It was eleven the next night too. But before she went to sleep it was two and three by the big clock, made of electric lights, hanging in the sky like a huge moon outside Reba's window at the end of the open train-yard space, that stretched away to the west for an uninterrupted quarter-of-a-mile.

The big face of the clock stared not only into Reba's room, but into her soul too, it seemed to her. She was well acquainted with the clock and it was well acquainted with her—Too well, oh, too well acquainted! This very clock used always to be waiting up for her when, concealed inside the closed automobile on those now flaying Saturday nights of a year ago, she came stealing speedily by it, on her way back to her room at the Alliance.

Had only twelve—eleven months passed since then?

"Oh, am I so fickle?" she asked of the clock outloudout-loud [sic] the second night after she had left Nathan downstairs. She had looked straight into his eyes for a long twenty seconds when they said good-night. She had done this to test herself. But she hadn't stood