"Where do you want to go?" she asked him, without looking at him.
"With you," he said.
Then she looked at him again, with the dry-eyed question. But she saw the unapproachable death-look there in his eyes, at the back of their dark-blue, dilated emotion and passion. And her heart gave up. She looked down the pier, as if to walk away. He carried his own bag. They set off side by side.
She lived in a tiny slab cottage in a side lane. But she called first at a neighbour's house, for her other child. It was a tiny, toddling thing with a defiant stare in its pale-blue eyes. Monica held her baby on one arm, and led this tottering child by the other. Jack walked at her side in silence.
The cottage had just two rooms, poorly furnished. But it was clean, and had bright cotton curtains and a sofa-bed, and a pale-blue convolvulus vine mingling with a passion vine over the window.
She laid the baby down in its cradle, and began to take off the bonnet of the little girl. She had called it Jane.
Jack watched the little Jane as if fascinated. The infant had curly reddish hair, of a lovely fine texture and a beautiful tint, something like raw silk with threads of red. Her eyes were round and bright blue, and rather defiant, and she had the delicate complexion of her kind. She fingered her mother's brooch, like a little monkey touching a bit of glittering gold, as Monica stooped to her.
"Daddy gone!" she said in her chirping, bird-like, quite emotionless tone.
"Yes, Daddy gone!" replied Monica, as emotionlessly.
The child then glanced with unmoved curiosity at Jack. She kept on looking and looking at him, sideways. And he watched her just as sharply, her sharp, pale-blue eyes.