She endured the look, but she could not suppress the color she felt rising in her face. It seemed to her that her strength must go if the moment lasted a little longer. She knew now that in the weeks of his absence she had longed for this look—for the fearful joy of it—and the realization left her overpowered.
At last, to her relief, he muttered some conventional phrase of his own pleasure in seeing her. But the look of the man still held her, an implacable look. She felt that the shy, embarrassed boy in him was gone forever. She had aged him all in a moment. There was something splendidly ruthless in his gaze, and in place of the confusion she was wont to wreak on him he showed a strange, dogged coolness.
"You've changed," he continued. "You're not well." The wondrous deep alarm of his tone warmed her through and through. She murmured a careless disavowal, and her low laugh, like the little comprehending chuckle of a pleased child, banished from her face for a moment its almost haggard set. But the face was flatly white again under the dark of her hair, and the white gown defined her frailness and drooping, as of some pale, long-stemmed flower fainting of languor in the still heat of late summer.
"You are whiter than ever," he insisted, "whiter and finer. You are like a white rose that is beginning to let its petals fall. You—you are beyond anything now." She laughed helplessly, as people laugh at something insupportable.
"You're going to tell me that people don't talk that way here," he went on, with his old fling of the head, like that of a horse about to gallop off, "but you understand me." He sighed, remembering his trouble for the first time. "But you understand me," he repeated, with a wistful attenuation of the words.
"Yes, I understand—everything," she said, seeing again the amazing sadness in him. Her look seized all the dejection of his attitude, the listless lean of his head, once upheld so gayly on the strong neck. She had to exert her will not to go nearer to him. She turned away and closed her eyes for a moment to shut him out, then opened them quickly and began to berate him charmingly for having neglected her. "I've thought of you so much oftener than I've seen you," she concluded.
He floundered in the old shyness. It had come suddenly on him when he thought of himself.
"I've been—at work."
"Your face shows it," she said, with a swift, unsteady look. "You have changed, too. You actually look ill."
He reddened slowly under her scrutiny, stammering protestations, but her eyes were open to him. She shrugged herself together and assumed a brisk, motherly air.