Hugh looks at her a little curiously.
"Why didn't you come then?" he asks.
"I don't know," says Molly, and again there is silence.
"And so you think I have changed so much?" queries Hugh presently.
"Yes, that is just it," replies Molly more briskly. "You do seem to have become so—so different somehow."
"In what lies the difference, Molly?"
"Well, I hardly know, Hugh—and yet I do know; only I don't like to say."
"Say away," he says, leaning back in his chair and laughing. "I won't mind."
"O, it is nothing disparaging," and Molly takes her hat off and swings it round. "The fact is you seem so—so dreadfully old now to what you were. Do you know," she adds, sinking her voice and nodding in her old way, "I felt quite afraid of you when I came into the drawing-room and peeped at you from behind Honor; I did indeed. Then there was your moustache, too. It makes you look quite severe, and I could not help wondering how I ever had the face to lecture and blow you up as I did in the old days. But you seemed so boyish then to what you do now. The alteration quite startled me at first."
Hugh laughs.