"I haven't lost it," she said.
"Tired of it already?"
"No; I didn't put it on this morning."
He looked at her with changed eyes. She dropped her own, went over to the lattice, and stood there facing seaward. When he came in to get the tobacco-pouch he had left on the rustic table, she went out. He thought of that morning in Paris when he had designed the belt and chosen the stones. How he had dwelt in imagination on the moment when he would clasp it round her, see her joy, and be given his reward! Then came back the actual moment of his giving her the gift—came back with an even greater anguish than he had known in living through the moments by the fire in his wife's room at the Fort. He tasted the intolerable bitter of the contrast between what he had hoped that hour would bring, and what it actually had brought, till he was ready to cry out: "What demon made me mention it? She's right not to wear the accursed thing!"
As soon as Val went in-doors he would go for a sail. For nearly half an hour she had been trailing about the garden in her soft white draperies, now bending down to look at some growing thing, now looking up to the wind-blown cloud masses, to where the strong sunlight poured down between the rifts. He leaned against the door of the summer-house, rolling cigarettes. He suspected rather than heard her talking her foolish "little language" to the bird in the juniper-bush, the spoiled bird that always got crumbs after breakfast. By-and-by she came towards him across the lawn with a little green branch in her hand. He realized that she must be weary, she was dragging her feet. Something curiously unlike Val, something inelastic, shackled, struck him in her gait. His face darkened suddenly; an involuntary shock of repulsion went through him, a resentment keen, impersonal, unconscious of everything save his own inward recoil, until he noticed Val had stopped short and the green branch had fallen at her feet. He went forward to pick it up. As he handed it to her he saw her eyes were full of tears.
"My dear one, what is it?" he said, with sharp remorse.
"Don't—don't look at me! Turn away your eyes."
"Why—why, dear?"
"Your eyes hurt—oh, they hurt me!"
"How can you say such a thing!" he exclaimed, ready to perjure himself. He would have laid his arm about her, but she shrank away. "It's not like you, Val!" he began, almost indignantly.