was he going to tackle her concerning Adair now that she had called him "a dear"?
But beneath his irritation and always struggling to surmount it was a quite different emotion—an emotion of tenderness. He kept seeing her as she had lain there sobbing, so fragile and dispossessed and broken. It was the whiteness of her neck that he remembered, the narrowness of her shoulders and the silkiness of her pale gold hair.
He had been standing at the window for perhaps five minutes when her voice reached him from a great distance. "Thanks muchly for the hanky. I'm better now."
"I'm glad," he said with his back towards her, once again on his guard.
As he turned slowly, she greeted him with a smile of welcome and nodded towards her sister's portrait. "She wouldn't have cried, you know."
"Wouldn't she?"
He had to say something; that seemed as good as anything. He made no attempt to approach her, but stood at bay against the window just where he had turned. He had arrived at one fixed determination; whatever happened, he would not again be entrapped into sharing the couch with her.
In answer to his unenthusiastic enquiry, Maisie shook her head vigorously like a little girl. "No, Di wouldn't. She never cries. Even when we were children we couldn't make her."
It flashed on Tabs that this conversation about the unknown woman was intended as a kind of peace-offering. Not to be ungracious, he roused himself to
a show of interest. "Couldn't make her! Surely you weren't so cruel as to try?"