His fury slowly passed, and he had but emerged from its strangely purifying fire into a calm that was well-nigh as terrible, when she entered sobbing into the cave to tell him the pitiable little lie that all her visible distress was for a pony to whom she had said farewell. He saw her presently totter forward to put more fuel on the fire and begin to prepare their evening meal. With eyes from which the smoke of passion had now lifted, he saw what he had only vaguely seen before: 301 that she was thin and haggard; that her pale face took on a hectic flush in the glow of the blazing pine; that her clothes were all in tatters, her riding-skirt slit in many places, her coat and flannel waist so worn, and torn that they barely covered her, and did indeed reveal one white shoulder through a gaping rent; that one dilapidated boot was quite out at toe; and that she was ill and faint and silent.
“Marion!” he called to her.
“Yes, Philip!” she answered, turning to look at him.
“Come here, please!”
She came and stood before him, unsteadily.
“Let me see your hands!”
She knelt, and held them out to him. Taking them in his own hands, which were then far softer and whiter than hers, he looked long at the raw and bleeding cracks, at the swollen joints, at the bruised and calloused fingers, at the nails (they were once so pink and polished) worn down to the quick, and at one nail that had been split back almost to its root.
“They’re not very pretty, are they?” she said, with a weak little laugh that ended in a quiver of her chin.
He lifted the hands, the right one and then the left, and touched them with his lips. She was very weary and faint and miserable; and he had never done anything like that before; and so she drew back her hands, and buried her face in them, and sank sobbing on the floor.