It was wonderful to him that this thing should have happened to him. He was aware that it was a new thing. Nothing in his previous experience had prepared him for it. He had been very young eight years ago, and a gayer, lighter-hearted chivalry had gone to his courtship of poor Amy. Poor Amy, though he would not own it, had been a rather ineffectual woman, with a prodigious opinion of her small self and a fretting passion for dominion. She had had a crowd of friends and relations whom she had allowed to come between them. Poor Amy had never understood him. There were heights and depths in him to which she had made no appeal.
But Kitty—she had brought something out of him that had been hidden and unknown to him before. Something that answered to the fear with which she had drawn back from him and to the tremendous and tragic passion with which she had given herself to him at the last. Poor little Amy had never held him so. She had never loved him like that in all her poor little life. And so his very tenderness for Kitty had terror in it, lest he should fail her, lest he should in any way justify her prescience of disaster.
Somebody was coming along the Cliff-path, somebody with a telegram for Mrs. Tailleur. She rose, moving away from Lucy as she opened it.
"There is no answer," she said. And she came to him again and sat beside him, very still, with hands spread over the telegram that lay open in her lap.
"Has anything happened?"
She shook her head. He took the hand that she held out to him by way of reassurance and possession.
"Then why do you look like that?"
She smiled.
"Kitty—that was an unconvincing smile."
"Was it? I'm sorry to say there's a tiresome man coming to see me."