own heads, so long as they kept it to themselves. And it had been
unexpectedly delicate and fine, the way he had come to understand,
without a syllable spoken on either side, that that piercing look of his
made her uneasy; and how he had promised her, wordlessly always, to bend
it on her no more.

_Why_ in the world had it made her uneasy, and why, a thousand times
why, had she felt this sudden unwillingness to look at the perfectly
commonplace photograph, in this company? Something had burst up from the
subconscious and flashed its way into action, moving her tongue to speak
and her hand to action before she had the faintest idea it was there . . .
like an action of youth! And see what a silly position it had put her
in!

The little boys had succeeded with the inspired tactlessness of children
in emphasizing and exaggerating what she had wished could be passed over
unnoticed, a gesture of hers as inexplicable to her as to them. Oh well,
the best thing, of course, was to carry it off matter-of-factly, turn
the leaf back, and _let_ them see it. And then refute them by insisting
on the literal truth of what she had said.

"There!" she said carelessly; "look at it then."

The little boys bent their eager faces over it. Paul read out the title
as he had been doing for the other photographs, "'View of the Campagna
from the top of the cable-railway at Rocca di Papa. Rome in the
distance.'"

She had to sustain, for an instant, an astonished and disconcerted look
from all those eyes. It made her quite genuinely break into a laugh. It