She paused. After all, her grandfather would be pleased to see him. Already her short-lived resentment that he had witnessed her humiliation was merged in bodily languor.
They mounted the stairs and as he saw how she clung to the railing with her hand, Simon Hart was seized afresh with surprise and horror. The pencilings of fatigue under her eyes accentuated her pallor and this morbid diminution in her beauty, lent her a poignant charm. She laid a hand on the door.
Amazed at the change in the dismantled room, which was no less than the change in her, he stood rooted to the threshold. Then he dropped his head in his hands.
Rachel, who suffered a faint return of embarrassment, refrained from looking at him.
"There," she said nervously, laying aside her wraps, "now I'll go and see if Grandfather's awake."
He was beside her: "Rachel, why—why didn't you let me know?"
"Let you know what?" and she stood back against the wall, striving to repell him with her eyes.
"That you were in want—in need. You could have written—" he floundered helplessly; then swept on almost in tears—"Didn't you know that I would help you gladly—thankfully? Oh where were my eyes! And you have been struggling!—Oh God, forgive me." He drew her bended wrist against his breast, and the shudders of his frame went to hers.
She tried to withdraw the hand. "I don't understand."
"So thin—" he continued, perusing her face, "so thin; almost starved. And no one to help you—not anyone. And I left you; I didn't even write—"