When she saw that he was awake, she smiled, and this seemed to the Inger the most marvellous thing that ever had befallen him: that she was there and that she smiled. He looked at her silently, and slowly under the even brownness of his skin, the color rose from his throat to his forehead, and burned crimson. But more than this color of shame, it was his eyes that told. They were upon her, brown, deep, like the eyes of a dog that has disobeyed, and has come back. For a moment he looked at her, then he dropped his face in his hands. She moved so quietly that he did not hear her rise. He merely felt her hand on his shoulder. And when he looked up again, she was sitting there beside him. “Don’t,” she said. He looked at her in amazement. Her look was gentle, her voice had been gentle. “You mustn’t,” she said. “It’s all over now.” “What do you think of me? What do you think of me?” he muttered, stupidly. She shrugged lightly. “It don’t make any difference what I think of you,” she said. “Ain’t it whether I’m goin’ to get away from Inch or not? Ain’t that the idea?” When he came to think of it, that was the immediate concern. With his first utterance he had blundered, as he had blundered since the moment when she had put herself in his keeping. None the less his misery was too sharp to dismiss. But he had no clear idea how to ask a woman’s forgiveness—a thing that he had never done in his life. “I feel as bad as hell,” he blurted out. “What for?” she asked. “For all I’ve done,” he put it. She considered this. “Look here,” she said slowly. “You’ve been drunk before often enough, ain’t you?” “Yes,” he answered, miserably. “Well, don’t feel bad about this just because I mixed up in it,” she said. “I’m used to it. I see Dad and all of ’em drunk more times ’n I see ’em sober.” He looked away from her. “I wasn’t thinking just about being drunk,” he said. “I meant—what I said to you.” “Oh—that!” she said. “Well. All men say that, I guess.” She looked at him. “I did guess you was differ’nt, but I ought to knowed better.” Then in a flash of intense joy, he remembered what she had said to him in the hut. Her words came back as if she were speaking them again: “I didn’t know no woman I could tell. Nor no other decent man.” Once more the warmth of this was upon him, within him. Then the recollection of how he had failed her invaded him in an anguish new, impossible to combat. For she had thought that he was different from Jem Moor and Bunchy.... The Inger got to his feet. “I _am_ differ’nt,” he heard himself surprisingly saying. She regarded him curiously, and with nothing in her eyes. It came to him as he stood looking down at her, that he would give all that might be asked if he could have seen her eyes as she looked up at him in the hut the night before and told him why she had come to him to help her. In the face of what had happened, the foolishness of protesting that he was different overcame him, and he fell silent.