But he did not answer her, and, after looking at him with a faint smile for a second or so, she turned to her group again. To-night, as they drove to their destination, once or twice, in passing a street-lamp, the light, flashing into the carriage, showed him that Bertha leaned back in her corner with closed eyes, her flowers lying untouched on her lap. He thought she seemed languid and pale, though she had not appeared so before they left the house. And this touched him, as such things always did. There was no moment, however deep and fierce his bewildered sense of injury might have been before it, when a shade of pallor on her cheek, or of sadness in her eyes, a look or tone of weariness, would not undo everything, and stir all his great heart with sympathy and the tender longing to be kind to her. The signs of sadness or pain in any human creature would have moved him, but such signs in her overwhelmed him and swept away every other feeling but this yearning desire to shield and care for her. He looked at her now with anxious eyes and bent forward to draw up her wrap which had slipped from her shoulders.
"Are you warm enough, Bertha?" he said, with awkward gentleness. "It is a raw night. You should have had more—more shawls—or whatever they are."
She opened her eyes with a smile.
"More shawls!" she said. "We don't wear shawls now when we go to receptions. They are not becoming enough, even when they are very grand indeed. This is not a shawl,—it is a sortie du bal, and a very pretty one; but I think I am warm enough, thank you, and it was very good in you to ask." And though he had not known that his own voice was gentle, he recognized that hers was.
"Somebody ought to ask," he answered. And just then they turned the corner into a street already crowded with carriages, and their own drew up before the lighted front of a large house. Tredennis got out and gave Bertha his hand. As she emerged from the shadow of the carriage, the light fell upon her again, and he was impressed even more forcibly than before with her pallor.
"You would have been a great deal better at home," he said, impetuously. "Why did you come here?"
She paused a second, and it seemed to him as if she suddenly gave up some tense hold she had previously kept upon her external self. There was only the pathetic little ghost of a smile in her lifted eyes.
"Yes, I should be better at home," she said, almost in a whisper. "I would rather be asleep with—with the children."
"Then why in Heaven's name do you go?" he protested. "Bertha, let me take you home and leave you to rest. It must be so—I"—
But the conventionalities did not permit that he should give way to the fine masculine impulse which might have prompted him in the heat of his emotions to return her to the carriage by the sheer strength of his unaided arm, and he recognized his own tone of command, and checked himself with a rueful sense of helplessness.