Max stood watching her, divided between prudence, which urged him to go,
and inclination, which prompted him to stay.

She went on with her work steadily for some minutes, without so much as
a look behind. Yet Max felt that she was aware of his presence, and he
knew also, without being sure how the knowledge came to him, that the
girl's feeling toward himself had changed now that she was no longer
alone in the house with him. The constraint which might have been
expected toward a person of the opposite sex in the strange
circumstances, which had been so entirely absent from her manner on
their first meeting, had now stolen into her attitude toward him.

Yet, although the former absence of this constraint had been a most
effective part of her attraction for him, Max began to think that the
new and slight self-consciousness which caused her to affect to ignore
him was a fresh charm. Before, while she implored him to come into the
house with her, it was to a fellow-creature only that the frightened
girl had made her appeal. Now that her grandmother had returned, and she
was lonely and unprotected no longer, she remembered that he was a man.

This change in her attitude toward him was strikingly exemplified when,
having lit the fire, she rose from her knees, and taking a kettle from
the hob, turned toward the door.

"You haven't gone then?" said she.

"No!"

She came forward, taking the lid off the kettle as she walked.