"There!" said he. "You will have to jump for them."
The girl stared at him incredulously; the words seeming to her some trick of her strained senses. But she glanced upwards to the file and sank back with a low moan.
"Will nothing touch you?" she said.
For a moment there was a pause. Only the noise of the brook laughing happily as it raced over the stones behind the house broke the silence in the room. Kate heard it vaguely, and it awoke a reminiscence.
"Do you remember?" she said. "At Poonah? There was a stream running past the verandah there."
She was speaking wearily, with closed eyes, and the firelight played upon a face as white and impassive as a wax mask.
"Yes! I remember," answered Hawke, his voice softening with the memory of those few months in India, The recollection was not of what they had thought or said or done--that would not have moved him; but simply of how he had felt towards her. He stood and watched her curiously. The dark lashes began to glisten, and then all in a moment her apathy broke up, and she was shaking in an agony of tears.
"I was never so hard to you," she faltered between her sobs.
The words floated out freely to Gordon and set his senses reeling. In Hawke they deepened the phantom tenderness already aroused. There was something so childlike in their simplicity. Indeed, as she crouched upon the floor in her abandonment, her white frock stained by her long journey, her sash all crumpled, her loosened hair curling vagrantly about her neck, and her slender figure quivering down to the tips of her shoes, she looked little more than a child masquerading in the emotions of a woman.
He took down the file and swung it irresolutely to and fro upon his finger. Kate turned to him impulsively.