years?

One thing struck me during the evening. Watching her most narrowly, I
could not see in her any under-current of feeling; she seemed to think
what she said, and to say just what she thought; there were no musings,
no reveries, no fits of abstraction, such as one would think would go
always with sin or crime. Her attention was given always to what was
passing; she was not in the least like a person with anything weighing
on her mind. We were talking, Lance and I, of an old friend of ours, who
had gone to Nice, and that led to a digression on the different watering
places of England. Lance mentioned several, the climate of which he
declared was unsurpassed--those mysterious places of which one reads in
the papers, where violets grow in December, and the sun shines all the
year round. I cannot remember who first named Brighton, but I do
remember that she neither changed color nor shrank.

"Now for a test," I said to myself. I looked at her straight in the
face, so that no expression of hers could escape me--no shadow pass over
her eyes unknown to me.

"Do you know Brighton at all?" I asked her. I could see to the very
depths of those limpid eyes. No shadow came; the beautiful, attentive
face did not change in the least. She smiled as she replied:

"I do not. I know Bournemouth and Eastbourne very well; I like
Bournemouth best."

We had hardly touched upon the subject, and she had glided from it, yet
with such seeming unconsciousness. I laughed, yet, I felt that my lips
were stiff and the sound of my voice strange.