"No, no," she said, on a wave of her old impetuosity, "it's not a bit like me! I would have loved the great miracle. I would have waited upon it reverently every step of the way, so proud, so happy—"
She broke off and went from him into the house.
His painful remorse was checkered by the reflection, "And I was going for a sail! Impossible now."
He stayed all the morning in the house or garden, reading to Val when she would let him, surrounding her with every offering of tenderness his keen self-reproach could invent. But he was too close in spirit to the woman at his side not to divine a little how she shrank from this new considerateness that was own cousin to pity.
As he sat in the library reading aloud before luncheon, he became acutely conscious of a change in her mood. At first he thought the story was interesting her deeply, and began to pay more attention to it himself, glancing up covertly now and then at the face opposite to him. The languid eyes were full of light again, her apathy swallowed up in some unexplained alertness. He was so struck with the change that he bent forward and laid his hand over hers. It trembled sharply under his touch. She rose and walked about the room. He read on till the luncheon-bell rang. She sat at the table scarcely eating, answering his remarks with gentle vagueness, and looking much out of the window.
"No hope of going to China to-day," he said, at last, following her eyes.
"Not at two," she answered. "That was why I didn't dress."
After luncheon they went back to the library.
"What do they mean by shutting the windows?" she exclaimed, and flung them wide.