And at nine o'clock he came.
Her eyes shone as she greeted him. There was nothing about her to remind him of the dejected, anæmic girl who had sat shivering over the fire last September. Maggie had got all her lights and colours back again. She was lifted from her abasement, glorified. And yet, for all her glory, Maggie, on her good behaviour, became once more the prim young lady of the lower middle class. She sat, as she had been used to sit on long, dull Sunday afternoons in the parlour above the village shop, bolt upright on her chair, with her meek hands folded in her lap. But her eyes were fixed on Majendie, their ardent candour contrasting oddly with the stiff modesty of her deportment.
"Have you been ill?" she asked.
"Why should I have been ill?"
"Because you didn't come."
"You mustn't suppose I'm ill every time I don't come. I might be a chronic invalid at that rate."
He hadn't realised how often he came. He didn't mark the days with crosses in a calendar.
"But you were ill, this time, I know."
"How do you know?"
The processes of Maggie's mind amused him. It was such a funny, fugitive, burrowing, darting thing, Maggie's mind, transparent and yet secret in its ways.