“I wrote only the letters I had to—no others.”
“Ah, I see.” He laughed slightly. “And you didn’t consider that letters to me were among them?”
She was silent, and he stood up and took a turn across the room. His face was redder than usual, and now and then a twitch passed over it. She saw that he felt the barrier of her crape, and that it left him baffled and resentful. A struggle was still perceptibly going on in him between his traditional standard of behaviour at such a meeting, and primitive impulses renewed by the memory of their last hours together. When he turned back and paused before her his ruddy flush had paled, and he stood there, frowning, uncertain, and visibly resenting the fact that she made him so.
“You sit there like a stone!” he said.
“I feel like a stone.”
“Oh, come—!”
She knew well enough what he was thinking: that the only way to bridge over such a bad beginning was to get the woman into your arms—and talk afterward. It was the classic move. He had done it dozens of times, no doubt, and was evidently asking himself why the deuce he couldn’t do it now.... But something in her look must have benumbed him. He sat down again beside her.
“What you must have been through, dearest!” He waited and coughed. “I can understand your being—all broken up. But I know nothing; remember, I know nothing as to what actually happened....”
“Nothing happened.”
“As to—what we feared? No hint—?”