"Do you really mean it?" she faltered searchingly.
"Of course I mean it," he replied, wondering what his meaning was supposed to be, but resolute to stand to this poor creature for any kindness and fortitude there might be in the world.
"You're very, very good," she said; but her eyes had in them, even to his discernment, an appreciation of another sort of worth.
That was at the beginning of the afternoon; yet, though he sculled her up stream later, to taste, melting in the heated air, the moist coolness under Bensington weir, and higher, afterwards, to the "Swan" for tea, she made no reference to that understanding which was by him so little understood.
But she was more than usually silent, and there was a dream-haze across the purple depths of her eyes, which only parted when she looked at him. Then the wonderful colour seemed to flood them, and she smiled faintly in the furthest crevice of her lips, as though they had been touched by the tips of some feathery pleasure.
But to Terence that sweetness of a shared secret in her smile was immensely discomposing.
That, he recognized, when he came to look back, was the moment of warning.
At that he had his fears, never stirred before; at that he should have taken flight.
Flight was the way of men; of men timorous and importuned; perhaps, often, the only way. But he had not the courage for such a show of fear; even flight seemed to affront a woman's confidence.
A sheaf of letters at breakfast offered him that bridge of fabulous affairs over which so many a man of wider experience would have escaped. But he gave it never a thought. Where was fraternity in the world if one had to flee from the first woman who dared to claim it? He would as soon have fled from an infectious fever!