She did not see her father's face as he went away from her; he did not see hers; she turned and stood upon the hearth with her back toward the door.
She stood so when, a few minutes afterward, Philip Tredennis came in; she stood so until he was within a few feet of her. Then she moved a little and looked up.
What she saw in him arrested for the moment her power to speak, and for that moment both were silent. Often as she had recognized the change which had taken place in him, often as the realization of it had wrung her heart, and wrung it all the more that she had understood so little, she had never before seen it as she saw it then. All the weariness, the anxious pain, the hopeless sadness of his past, seemed to have come to the surface; he could endure no more; he had borne the strain too long, and he knew too well that the end had come. No need for words to tell him that he must lose even the poor and bitter comfort he had clung to; he had made up his mind to that when he had defended her against the man who himself should have been her defence.
So he stood silent and his deep eyes looked out from his strong, worn, haggard face, holding no reproach, full only of pity for her.
There was enough to pity in her. If she saw anguish in his eyes, what he saw in hers as she uplifted them he could scarcely have expressed in any words he knew; surely there were no words into which he could have put the pang their look gave him, telling him as it did that she had reached the point where she could stand on guard no more.
"Richard," she said at length, "has gone away."
"That I knew," he answered.
"When?" she asked.
"I had a letter from him this morning," he said.