"More than I show, I am afraid," she answered.
"Oh," he returned, "even I can discern some
changes. You are more, if I wanted to be subtly flattering, I should say, you are more beautiful, more of the world in appearance, and I know what the Countess meant when she said you were becoming 'epic, grand, and homicidal,' or something like that."
"How horrible!" she laughed.
"Not at all, only not as I remembered you." He spoke the words slowly, against his will and his judgment, and in defiance of taste or conduct, looking up as he did so into eyes which from their first glance, over three years before in the woods in North Carolina, had been able to stir him as no other eyes had ever done. And it seemed to him as though in that look all conventions were dropped between them. "You were kind to me then, Katrine."
She looked at him steadily, as a child might have done, with no shrinking in her glance, with neither anger nor shame. "And you?" she asked, wistfully. "Were you very kind to me?"
"I was not. God!" he said, "if you could only know how I have suffered for the way I acted! To feel such shame as I have felt! Oh," he cried, "nobody on earth could make me talk this way but you! There was always between us
a curious understanding, wasn't there, Katrine, even apart from the other?" He finished vaguely.
"I knew you would suffer. I was sorry for that," she answered, gravely.
"Were you, truly? Were you big enough for that?"