He did not look at her too closely.

All at once it had dawned upon him that her situation must be tremendously more embarrassing than his own.

He felt, too, the tingle of a new excitement in his veins.

It was a pleasurable sensation, something which he did not pause to analyze just at present.

Only he knew that it was because she had told him as plainly as she could that Bram had not harmed her.
"And if he HAD I guess you'd have let me smash his brains out when he was bending over the stove, wouldn't you ?" he said, stirring the mess of desiccated potato he was warming in one of his kit-pans.