It was Arthur she did not want to think of. "Arthur! Arthur! Arthur!" the wheel mocked. "Arthur! Arthur! Arthur!"
Her head went into her hands. She was moaning and crying again. "Don't let me think of him any more ... if only I needn't think of him any more...."
She began to work again. There was nothing to do but persist in trying to work, she thought. If she kept to it, perhaps in the end the routine would take her; she would become absorbed in the mechanism of what she was doing.
A shadow was thrown before her. In the mirror Sophie saw that John Armitage was standing in the doorway. Her feet ceased to work the treadles of the cutting-wheel; her hands fell to her lap; she waited for him to come into the room. He walked past her to the window, and stood with his back to it, facing her. Her eyes went to him. She let him take what impression he might from her face, her defences were down; vaguely, perhaps, she hoped he would read something of her mind in her face, that he would need no explanation of what she had no words to express.
There had been a smile of faint cynicism in his eyes as he looked towards her; it evaporated as she surrendered to the inquisition of his gaze.
"Well?" he inquired gravely.
"Well?" she replied as gravely.
They studied each other quietly.
John Armitage had changed very little since she had first seen him. His clean-shaven face was harder, a little more firmly set perhaps; the indecision had gone from it; it had lost some of its amiable mobility. He looked much more a man of the world he was living in—a business man, whose intelligence and energies had been trained in its service—but his eyes still had their subtle knowledge and sympathy, his individuality the attraction it had first had for her.
He was wearing the loose, well-cut tweeds he travelled in, and had taken off his hat. It lay on the window-sill beside him, and Sophie saw that there was more silver in his hair where it was brushed back from his ears than there used to be. His eyes surveyed her as if she were written in an argot or dialect which puzzled him; his hands drifted and moved before her as he smoked a cigarette. His hands emphasised the difference between John Lincoln Armitage and men of the Ridge. Sophie thought of Potch's hands, and of Michael's, and the smile Michael might have had for Armitage's hands curved her lips.