"I might have shown it to the children," he said, reflectively. "I don't quite know why I didn't. But I'm glad I didn't, too."
She asked him who the children were, and he told her about Jane and Pobbles, and the things that they had done together. She asked him a good many questions and was a little particular in fixing the exact date of Jane's birth, and of her arrival at Royd.
Harry answered all her questions and told her of the map that he had begun to draw for them the afternoon before. "It seems such ages ago," he said. "I was missing them both, but I don't think I've given them a thought since, until just now."
She allowed herself to soften towards Jane; for at one point she had suggested that she seemed rather precocious for so young a child. "Poor little things!" she said. "I'm sure they must miss you, too. You have been so good to them. And they are the only young friends you have had, aren't they?"
Talking of the children had a little lowered the note of intimacy. Her last words restored it. "Until I knew you," he answered.
"And that's such a very short time."
"No; it's a very long time. It's all the time that matters."
She smiled at him, and he went on. "Think of it, that only yesterday—yesterday, much later than this—I was feeling dull and unhappy. Then I rode out to the sea, and felt much better, but I didn't know anything about you. Fancy—only yesterday I had never seen you."
She listened with her eyes fixed upon him and her lips a little apart. "What did you think when you first saw me?" she asked, softly.
He hesitated, and then laughed. "I don't think I thought anything in particular," he said. "That's what is so extraordinary. What did you think when you saw me?"