Christopher looked at her, and thought he saw something about her eyes that told of tears.
“Do you mind crying?” he said, lowering his voice while more feeling escaped into his glance than he had intended; “it doesn’t seem natural that you should ever cry.”
“You’re very inquisitive!” said Francie, the sparkle coming back to her eye in a moment; “why shouldn’t I cry if I choose?”
“I should not like to think that you had anything to make you cry.”
She looked quickly at him to see if his face were as sincere as his voice; her perceptions were fine enough to suggest that it would be typical of Christopher to show her by a special deference and friendliness that he was sorry for her, but now, as ever, she was unable to classify those delicate shades of manner and meaning that might have told her where his liking melted into love. She had been accustomed to see men as trees walking, beings about whose individuality of character she did not trouble herself; generally they made love to her, and, if they did not, she presumed that they did not care about her, and gave them no further attention. But this test did not seem satisfactory in Christopher’s case.
“I know what everyone thinks of me,” she said, a heart truth welling to the surface as she felt herself pitied and comprehended; “no one believes I ever have any trouble about anything.”
Christopher’s heart throbbed at the bitterness in a voice that he had always known so wholly careless and undisturbed; it increased his pity for her a thousandfold, but it stirred him with a strange and selfish pleasure to think that she had suffered. Whatever it was that was in her mind, it had given him a glimpse of that deeper part of her nature, so passionately guessed at, so long unfindable. He did not for an instant think of Hawkins, having explained away that episode to himself some time before in the light of his new reading of Francie’s character; it was Charlotte’s face as she confronted Mary Norris in the market that came to him, and the thought of what it must be to be under her roof and dependent on her. He saw now the full pain that Francie bore in hearing herself proclaimed as the lure by which he was to be captured, and that he should have brought her thus low roused a tenderness in him that would not be gainsaid.
“I don’t think it,” he said, stammering; “you might believe that I think more about you than other people do. I know you feel things more than you let anyone see, and that makes it all the worse for anyone who—who is sorry for you, and wants to tell you so—”
This halting statement, so remarkably different in diction from the leisurely sentences in which Christopher usually expressed himself, did not tend to put Francie more at her ease. She reddened slowly and painfully as his shortsighted, grey eyes rested upon her. Hawkins filled so prominent a place in her mind that Christopher’s ambiguous allusions seemed to be directed absolutely at him, and her hand instinctively slipped into her pocket and clasped the letter that was there, as if in that way she could hold her secret fast.
“Ah, well,”—she tried to say it lightly—“I don’t want so very much pity yet awhile; when I do, I’ll ask you for it!”