There was a pause. He regarded her more and more as a stranger. A grim, inscrutable stoniness seemed to have frozen her nature. She had evidently nursed and cultivated an old grief with an egoism that had become fanatical. And then, as he recalled all the vanished splendour of her beauty, and looked at the emaciated throat and angular shoulders which made the flatness of her bust the more apparent, pity and his old love for her gained the upper hand. What must she have suffered to have so changed in appearance?
"We can't go on like this, Hannah," he said. "If I have done anything to displease you, speak out and let us make it up."
For a moment a kindlier glance shot from her eyes. But he fancied it meant that she pitied him, and so he was not reassured.
However, he did not wish to rely on conjecture. He would try and put things on the old hearty footing between them.
"Look here!" he said, "it is plain that your soul is cherishing some old grudge. You and I always held to one another. Can't you feel the old confidence in me again? Tell me what your trouble is, and see if I can't heal the wound."
"It seems to me that you stand in greater need of healing than I do," she answered, without taking her sphinx-like eyes off him.
"How so?" he asked, and plunged his hands into his trouser-pockets, stretching his legs wide apart as he planted himself in front of her.
"I have often asked myself, Leo, what sort of man you would come back. I hoped you might appear before us serious and subdued, a little burdened by the consciousness of what you had brought upon yourself and us. Often enough I have prayed God that it might be so. But instead you are--are---- Aye, what you are any one can see with half an eye."
"Well, what am I?" he asked, hardening into an attitude of scoffing amusement.
"I can only hope, for your own sake," she went on, "that your conduct is not real, but a mask, that behind there is something more than one would suppose from your plump, happy face. But if you are not acting and deceiving us, if in reality you are so thoroughly satisfied with yourself, then, dear Leo, it would have been better if our mother had never borne you."