"Oh, please don't touch me, just for a minute!" she exclaimed.
"Please—please—just stop a minute!"
She did not realize that her tone was very much that of a patient addressing a dentist. Francis's arms dropped, and he looked at her, all the light going out of his face, and showing its weary lines. He closed the door entirely, carefully. He went mechanically over to a chair and sat down on it, always with that queer carefulness; he laid his cap beside him, and looked at Marjorie, crouched against the door.
"Please come over here and sit down," he said very courteously, but with the boyishness gone from his voice even more completely than Marjorie had wished.
She came very meekly and sat opposite him, with a little queer cold feeling around her heart.
"Please look at me," he asked gently. She lifted her blue eyes miserably to his, and tried to smile. But unconsciously she shrank a little as she did so, and he saw it.
"I won't touch you—not until you want me to," he began. "What's the matter, Marjorie? Is it nerves, or are you afraid of me, or——"
"It—it was just your coming so suddenly," she lied miserably. "It upset me. That was all."
In her mind there was fixed firmly the one thing, that she mustn't be a coward, she must go through with it, she must pretend well enough to make Francis think she felt the way she ought to. The Francis of pre-war times would have been fooled; but this man had been judging men and events that took as keen a mind as seeing through a frightened girl. He looked at her musingly, his face never changing. She rose and came over to him and put her hand on his shoulder. She even managed to laugh.
"Do you mind my being upset?" she asked.
"No," he said, "if that's all it is. But you have a particular kind of terror about you that I don't like. Or I think you have."