"My poor girl, what's the matter? Haven't they finished yet?"
Instead of answering she pressed her face into the cushion and began to sob. The violence of her weeping shook her hair down on her shoulders, and her hands, clenching the arm of the sofa, pressed it away from her as if any contact were insufferable.
Ralph bent over her in alarm. "Why, what's wrong, dear? What's happened?"
Her fatigue of the previous evening came back to him—a puzzled hunted look in her eyes; and with the memory a vague wonder revived. He had fancied himself fairly disencumbered of the stock formulas about the hallowing effects of motherhood, and there were many reasons for not welcoming the news he suspected she had to give; but the woman a man loves is always a special case, and everything was different that befell Undine. If this was what had befallen her it was wonderful and divine: for the moment that was all he felt.
"Dear, tell me what's the matter," he pleaded.
She sobbed on unheedingly and he waited for her agitation to subside. He shrank from the phrases considered appropriate to the situation, but he wanted to hold her close and give her the depth of his heart in long kiss.
Suddenly she sat upright and turned a desperate face on him. "Why on earth are you staring at me like that? Anybody can see what's the matter!"
He winced at her tone, but managed to get one of her hands in his; and they stayed thus in silence, eye to eye.
"Are you as sorry as all that?" he began at length conscious of the flatness of his voice.
"Sorry—sorry? I'm—I'm—" She snatched her hand away, and went on weeping.