“It is Mary,” the botanist whispers with white lips, but he stares at the form of the man. His face whitens, it becomes so transfigured with emotion that for a moment it does not look weak. Then I see that his thin hand is clenched.
I realise how little I understand his emotions.
A sudden fear of what he will do takes hold of me. He sits white and tense as the two come into the clearer light of the courtyard. The man, I see, is one of the samurai, a dark, strong-faced man, a man I have never seen before, and she is wearing the robe that shows her a follower of the Lesser Rule.
Some glimmering of the botanist's feelings strikes through to my slow sympathies. Of course—a strange man! I put out a restraining hand towards his arm. “I told you,” I say, “that very probably, most probably, she would have met some other. I tried to prepare you.”
“Nonsense,” he whispers, without looking at me. “It isn't that. It's—that scoundrel—”
He has an impulse to rise. “That scoundrel,” he repeats.
“He isn't a scoundrel,” I say. “How do you know? Keep still! Why are you standing up?”
He and I stand up quickly, I as soon as he. But now the full meaning of the group has reached me. I grip his arm. “Be sensible,” I say, speaking very quickly, and with my back to the approaching couple. “He's not a scoundrel here. This world is different from that. It's caught his pride somehow and made a man of him. Whatever troubled them there—”
He turns a face of white wrath on me, of accusation, and for the moment of unexpected force. “This is your doing,” he says. “You have done this to mock me. He—of all men!” For a moment speech fails him, then; “You—you have done this to mock me.”
I try to explain very quickly. My tone is almost propitiatory.