He held her from him and looked anxiously into her face. There was scant comfort there for him.
"When you talk like that," she murmured, "I feel that I must be different from all other people. You expect something from me which I know nothing about. I do not feel toward you in the least like you say you feel toward me. Why is it?"
"It will come!" he declared confidently. "I am sure of it. In the future it must come."
She moved away and Powers watched her wistfully. She was thinner than he had ever known her, and of that wonderful fresh beauty which had taken London by storm there remained but few traces. Yet to him there came at that moment a wonderful impulse of love. The wistfulness which shone in her eyes, the wasted cheeks, the pallor of her once beautiful complexion, seemed in a sense to have spiritualized her. The child whose frank sensuousness had horrified him seemed to have passed away.
Once more she was the girl whom he had met on the wet pavement of the city, brave and womanly, although in desperate straits—the woman who, however unexpectedly, had first found her way to his heart. Never, even in those days when her beauty had been unrivaled, and her train of admirers a constant source of embarrassment, had she seemed to him more to be desired than at that moment.
As she walked she began to sing softly and to herself. He wondered at the strange chanting tune and at the time-forgotten words. And as she sang the color brightened her cheeks, and the wakening breezes blew the hair about her face.
A great sea-bird, disturbed by her voice, rose from the ditch below with a flapping of wings and drifted away seaward.
"It is only a bird," she said. "If you had seen as many of them as I have, you would not heed them. I have seen them in droves, when their wings darkened the sky, and I have heard them calling to one another down the north wind. Where have you lived all your life that you know nothing of these things?"
She laughed softly.
"Come and sit with me on the sand-hill there," she said, "and I will tell you about the sea."