"I think I've caught cold," she murmured to herself. Producing a tiny
handkerchief she seemed to apply it to her nose, and so caught that one
little tear. Her movements were wonderfully graceful, but the man
looking at her did not think of that. What he thought was:--How exactly
she was herself and no one else. How could she have that child's
simplicity of hers, and her amazing power of seeing through a stone
wall? How could she be a saint and have all a woman's faults? How could
she live half in another world and yet with all her absurd unworldliness
be so eminently a woman of this one? She was twenty-six, but she knew
what many women of fifty never learn; she was twenty-six, yet she was
more innocent than many a child of thirteen. What a contrast to Molly's
crude ignorance and hankering after success!

All the time he looked at her in silence and she did not seem to realise
it. She put her handkerchief into her belt and took it out again; she
touched her hair, seeing in the glass that it was untidy. Then she sat
down on a low stool, and her soft, fluffy black draperies fell round
her. She pressed her elbows on her knees, and sank her face in her
hands. She might have been alone; he was not quite sure she was not
praying. There were some moments of silence. At last she moved, raised
her head, and looked him gently full in the face.

"And you--you never talk about yourself," she said, with a thrill in her
voice that he had known so long. "I always talk so much of myself when I
am alone with you."

"No," he said, with a touch of lazy anger, "I'm not worth talking about,
not worth thinking of, and you know it!"