"But there's a good deal the matter with it!" she exclaimed, concerned. "It's swollen—it looks discolored, too.—How did you hurt yourself?"
"Oh, that? Oh!" said Charles, carefully fitting on his hat, and then removing it again. "I remember now—it's nothing. Got a tumble this afternoon, that's all. Stupid thing."
"You must let me get some hot water down the hall. I'm afraid it's—"
But he indicated, quite brusquely, that his eye was all right, just the way he liked it, that having water put on it was, in particular, the last thing he would ever dream of.
She said behind him, slowly, after a pause: "If you won't, you won't, of course.... But it's so exactly like you—"
"Ready?" said Charles.
But when he turned he found that Mary had turned, too, after him—stood facing him anew. And this time the confrontation was too near, too immediate, to be further avoided.
He now discovered that the thin veil had not withdrawn his friend very far. Looking at her for the first time since her cataclysm, he saw that her delicate face wore that look described as "rain-washed," which commonly means peace, but peace at a price. The redness of her eyelids was quite perceptible. What struck the young man particularly, however, was the look of the blue eyes themselves. More or less irrelevant eyes he had always thought them, for all the heavy arched brows which so emphasized their faculty for steady, sometimes disconcerting, interrogation. That characteristic grave intentness was in Mary's gaze now: but it was not this that gave her look its power to hold Charles Garrott in his tracks.
The peculiar commotion within him gave forth in a short laugh, testy and embarrassed: "Honestly, if you say the word 'eye' to me again—"
"I wasn't going to speak of your eye," said Mary Wing, with quite remarkable meekness.... "I was thinking of that remark you made—about being a fair-weather friend."