Taking her face in his hands, Armitage scrutinised it as though he must read there what her silence held from him.
He realised how wan and weary-looking it was. Shadows beneath her eyes fell far down her cheeks, her lips lay together with a new, strange sternness. But he could not think of that yet. His male egoism could only consider its own situation, fight imperiously in its own defence.
"You want something I can't give you?"
His eyes held her for the fraction of a second; then, the pain of knowledge gripping him, his hands fell from her face. He turned away.
"Which is it ... Potch or—the other?" He spoke with cruel bitterness. "It's always a case of 'which' with you—isn't it?"
"That's just it," Sophie said.
He glanced at her, surprised to hear a note of the same bitterness in her voice.
"I didn't mean that, Sophie," he said. "You know I didn't."
She smiled.
"It's true all the same."