"Milk or cream?"
"Milk."
She handed him the cup in silence. There was something in the frank, questioning look in her blue eyes that made him avert his gaze. Their meeting had not been at all as he had imagined it. He did not spring towards her, boyishly, and take her in his arms and kiss her. He had approached her humbly and timidly when she stood before him, in all her white purity and beauty, and their lips had met in a brief kiss of greeting. Her manner had been curiously formal and restrained, empty of all outward display of emotion.
And now they sat at tea in her room with the conversation lagging between them. As he looked round at the room with its chintzes and rose-bowls, its old restfulness reasserted itself. But to Humphrey it seemed now more than restful—it seemed stagnant and out of the world.... Somewhere, in Paris, there were music and laughter, but here, in this quiet backwater of London, one's vision became narrow, and life seemed a monotonous repetition of days. He felt moody, depressed; a sense of coming disaster hung over his mind, like a shadow. Her quick sympathy perceived his gloom.
"You ought not to have gone," she said, softly.
"You mean to the funeral?"
"Yes; you are too susceptible ... too easily influenced by surroundings. There was no need to come all this way to make yourself miserable."
"I don't know why I went," he said. "We never had much in common, my aunt and I, but somehow ... I don't know ... I couldn't bear the thought of not being present at her funeral. I had a silly sort of idea that she would know if I were not there."
"You are too susceptible," she repeated. "Sometimes I wish you were stronger. You are too much afraid of what people will think of you. This death has meant nothing at all to you, but you are ashamed to say so."
"It has meant something to me," he said. "I don't mean that I felt a wrench, as if some one whom I loved very dearly had gone ... I felt that when my father died ... but her death has changed me somehow—here—" and he tapped his breast, "I feel older. I feel as if I had stood over the grave and seen the burial of my youth."