As she was peeling her peach the door opened, and Roger came in. If there had been anyone to notice it—but no one ever noticed anything about Janey—they might have seen that as she perceived him she became a pretty woman. A soft red mounted to her cheek, her tired eyes shone, her small, erect figure became alert. He had not dined, after all. She sent for the earlier dishes, and while he ate, refrained from asking him any questions.
"You do not look as tired as I expected," she said.
Roger replied that he was not the least tired There was in his bearing some of the alertness of hers, and she noticed it with a sudden secret uprush of joy in her heart. Surely it was the same for both of them? To be together was all they needed. But oh! how she needed that! How far greater her need was than his!
They might have been taken for brother and sister as they sat together in the dining-room in the light of the four wax candles.
They were what the village people called "real Manverses," both of them, sturdy, well knit, erect, with short, straight noses, and grey, direct, wide-open eyes, and brown complexions, and crisp brown hair. Each was good-looking in a way. Janey had the advantage of youth, but her life had been more burdened than Roger's, and at five-and-thirty he did not look much older than she did at five-and-twenty, except that he showed a tendency to be square-set, and his hair was thinning a little at the top of his honest, well-shaped head. He was, as Mrs. Nicholls often remarked, "the very statue of the old squire," his uncle and Janey's father.
"Pray don't hurry, Roger. There is plenty of time."
"I'm not hurrying, old girl," with another gulp.
It was a secret infinitesimal grief to Janey that Roger called her "old girl." A hundred little traits showed that she had seen almost nothing of the world, but he, in spite of public school and college, gave the impression of having seen even less. There were a few small tiresomenesses about Roger to which even Janey's faithful adoration could not quite shut its eyes. But they were, after all, only external foibles, such as calling her "old girl," tricks of manner, small gaucheries and gruntings and lapses into inattention, the result of living too much alone, which wise Janey knew were of no real account. The things that really mattered about Roger were his kind heart and his good business-head and his uprightness.
"Never seen Paris before, and don't care if I never see it again," he vouchsafed between enormous mouthfuls. He never listened—at least not to Janey—and his conversation consisted largely of disjointed remarks, thrown out at intervals, very much as unprofitable or waste material is chucked over a wall, without reference to the person whom it may strike on the other side.
"I should like to see Paris myself."