Lucia spared him all the embarrassments of that approach As if she had divined his feeling, she turned, she came forward to meet him, she held out her hand and smiled as she would have smiled if nothing had happened.
His hand trembled visibly as it dropped from hers. He hid it in his breast pocket, where it pretended to be looking for things.
"Miss Palliser said she thought you would see me—"
"Yes, I wanted to see you; I would have sent for you if you had not come. Sit down, please."
She sat down herself, in her old place at the writing table.
He took the chair beside her and leaned back, resting his arm on the table. She turned so as to face him.
She was not so changed but that his hungry and unhappy eyes could rest on her, appeased and comforted. And yet she was changed, too. Her girlhood, with all its innocence of suffering, had died in her. But the touch of that death was masterly, it had redeemed her beauty from the vagueness of its youth. Grief, that drags or sharpens or deforms the faces of older women, had given to hers the precision that it lacked. There was a faint sallow tinge in the whiteness of her skin, and her eyelids drooped as if she were tired to the point of exhaustion. He noticed, too, the pathetic tension that restrained the quivering of her mouth. It was the upper lip that trembled.
"You have been ill?" she said.
And as he answered that, "Oh, it was nothing," he was aware for the first time how very much it had been. She too was aware of it.
She expressed her concern; she hoped that they had looked after him well at the hotel.