“That lovely child! But it's impossible!”
“The impossible is sometimes true, Jimmy.”
“I refuse to believe it.”
“I tell you it is so,” she said angrily.
“What a ghastly shame!”
“It was her own doing; she said so, herself.”
“And her father—the padre! My God!”
Leila was suddenly smitten with a horrible doubt. She had thought it would disgust him, cure him of any little tendency to romanticise that child; and now she perceived that it was rousing in him, instead, a dangerous compassion. She could have bitten her tongue out for having spoken. When he got on the high horse of some championship, he was not to be trusted, she had found that out; was even finding it out bitterly in her own relations with him, constantly aware that half her hold on him, at least, lay in his sense of chivalry, aware that he knew her lurking dread of being flung on the beach, by age. Only ten minutes ago he had uttered a tirade before the cage of a monkey which seemed unhappy. And now she had roused that dangerous side of him in favour of Noel. What an idiot she had been!
“Don't look like that, Jimmy. I'm sorry I told you.”
His hand did not answer her pressure in the least, but he muttered: