“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!”

For a moment she flushed.

“You always have abused yourself.”

“Because I know what’s in your thoughts, and when I am with you I can’t help expressing them—­there!” he concluded defiantly, and crossed and uncrossed his legs again.

“Edmund, that isn’t one bit, one little bit true.  But I do wish you were happier.”

“Yes, of course,” he went on sardonically, “you know that too.  You know that I loathe and detest life—­that I hate the morning because it begins a new day.  Oh, I am bored to extinction, you know all that, you most exasperating woman.  I hate”—­he suddenly seemed to see that he was giving her pain, and the next words were muttered to himself—­“no, I love the pity in your eyes.”

The graceful figure sitting there trembled a little, and the white hands covered the eyes again.

“But,” he went on quickly in a louder voice, “the pity’s no good.  You might as well expect me to command an army to-morrow, or become an efficient Prime Minister, or an Archbishop of Canterbury, or a Roman Catholic Cardinal, or anything else that is impossible, as become the sort of man you would like me to be.  You know so perfectly well,” he laughed, “how rotten I am; you are astonished if you find me do any sort of good—­you can’t help it, how can you, when it’s just and true?  Do you know I sometimes have had absurd dreams of what I might have been if you had not been so terribly clear-sighted.  You stood in your white frock under the old mulberry tree—­your first long skirt—­and you saw that I was no good, and you were perfectly right, but, after all, what is your life to be now?”