"No ... not after what's happened, I presume. You wouldn't have followed—you wouldn't have fought so to save me from drowning—I suppose—if you hadn't—cared.... But I didn't know."
She sighed, a sigh plaintive and perturbed, then resumed: "A woman never knows, really. She may suspect; in fact, she almost always does; she is obliged to be so continually on guard that suspicion is ingrained in her nature; but...."
"Then you're not—offended?" he asked, sitting up.
"Why should I be?" The firelight momentarily outlined the smiling, half wistful countenance she turned to him.
"But"—he exploded with righteous wrath, self-centred—"only a scoundrel would force his attentions upon a woman, in such circumstances! You can't get away from me—I may be utterly hateful to you—"
"Oh, you're not." She laughed quietly. "You're not; nor am I distressed—because of the circumstances that distress you, at least. What woman would be who received as great and honourable a compliment—from you, Hugh? Only"—again the whimsical little laugh that merged into a smothered sigh—"I wish I knew!"
"Wish you knew what?"
"What's going on inside that extraordinary head of yours: what's in the mind behind the eyes that I so often find staring at me so curiously."
He bowed that head between hands that compressed cruelly his temples. "I wish I knew!" he groaned in protest. "It's a mystery to me, the spell you've laid upon my thoughts. Ever since we met you've haunted me with a weird suggestion of some elusive relationship, some entanglement—intimacy—gone, perished, forgotten.... But since you called me to supper, a while ago, by name—I don't know why—your voice, as you used it then, has run through my head and through, teasing my memory like a strain of music from some half-remembered song. It half-maddens me; I feel so strongly that everything would be so straight and plain and clear between us, if I could only fasten upon that fugitive, indefinable something that's always fluttering just beyond my grasp!"
"You mean all that—honestly?" she demanded in an oddly startled voice.