At noon the girl had not awakened. But something in John B. Marche had.
He looked in horrified surprise at the decoys, then looked at Molly
Herold; then he gazed in profound astonishment at Uncle Dudley, who made
a cryptic remark to the wife of his bosom, and then tipped upside down.

Marche examined the sky and water so carefully that he did not see them;
then, sideways, and with an increasing sensation of consternation, he
looked again at the sleeping girl.

His was not even a friendly gaze, now; there was more than dawning alarm
in it--an irritated curiosity which grew more intense as the seconds
throbbed out, absurdly timed by a most remarkable obligato from his
heart.

He gazed stonily upon this stranger into whose life he had drifted only
a week before, whose slumbers he felt that he was now unwarrantedly
invading with a mental presumption that scared him; and yet, as often as
he looked elsewhere, he looked back at her again, confused by the slowly
dawning recognition of a fascination which he was utterly powerless to
check or even control.

One thing was already certain; he wanted to know her, to learn from her
own lips intimately about herself, about her thoughts, her desires, her
tastes, her aspirations--even her slightest fancies.

Absorbed, charmed by her quiet breathing, fascinated into immobility, he
sat there gazing at her, trying to reconcile the steadily strengthening
desire to know her with what he already knew of her--of this sleeping
stranger, this shabby child of a poor man, dressed in the boots and
shooting coat of that wretchedly poor man--his own superintendent, a
sick man whom he had never even seen.