"Oh dear, yes, of course," she was saying. "But I never realised she was a sister of your old Oxford friend. I wish I had. It would have been so pleasant to talk about you and about home in that far country! Her husband is in the Rifle Brigade, and she really is a nice, dear woman. I saw a great deal of her while we were at the Cape."
And so, under cover of Mary's kindly conversation, Miss St. Quentin settled down into her lazy, swinging stride. Her small head carried high, her pale, sensitive face very serious, her straight eyebrows drawn together by concentration of purpose, concentration of thought, she followed the boy up the long room.
As she came towards him, Richard Calmady looked full at her. His head was carried somewhat high too. His face was very still. His eyes—with those curiously small pupils to them—were very observant, in effect hiding rather than revealing his thought. His manner, as he held out his hand to her, was courteous, even friendly, and yet, notwithstanding her high and fearless spirit, Honoria—for the first time in her life probably—felt afraid. And then she began to understand how it came about that, whether he behaved well or ill, whether he was good or bad, cruel or kind, seen or unseen even, Richard, of necessity, could not but occupy a good deal of space in the lives of all persons brought into close contact with him. For she recognised in him a rather tremendous creature, self-contained, not easily accessible, possessed of a larger portion than most men of energy and resolution, possessed too—and this, as she thought of it, again turned her a trifle sick—of an unusual capacity of suffering.
"I am ashamed of being so dreadfully late," she said as she slipped into the vacant place on his left.—Godfrey Ormiston was beyond her, next to Julius March.—Honoria was aware that her voice sounded slightly unsteady, in part from her recent scamper, in part from a queer emotion which seemed to clutch at her throat.—"But we walked home over the fields and by the Warren, and just in that boggy bit where you cross the Welsh-road, Godfrey found the slot of a red-deer in the snow, and naturally we both had to follow it up."
"Naturally," Richard said.
"I'm not so sure it was a red-deer, Honoria," the boy broke in.
"Oh yes, it was," she declared as she helped herself to a cutlet. "It couldn't have been anything else."
"Why not?" Richard asked. He was interested by the tone of assurance in which she spoke.
"Oh, well, the tracks were too big for a fallow-deer to begin with. And then there's a difference, you can't mistake it if you've ever compared the two, in the cleft of the hoof."
"And you have compared the two?"