At first it was an even match, for Gwenda's intellect, like her body, was robust. It generally held its ground from Thursday morning till Tuesday night. But the night that followed Wednesday afternoon would see its overthrow.
This Wednesday it fought gallantly till the very moment of Steven's arrival. She was still reading Bergson, and her brain struggled to make out the sense and rhythm of the sentences across the beating of her heart.
After seven years her heart still beat at Steven's coming.
It remained an excitement and adventure, for she never knew how he would be. Sometimes he hadn't a word to say to her and left her miserable. Sometimes, after a hard day's work, he would be tired and heavy; she saw him middle-aged and her heart would ache for him. Sometimes he would be young almost as he used to be. She knew that he was only young for her. He was young because he loved her. She had never seen him so with Mary. Sometimes he would be formal and frigid. He talked to her as a man talks to a woman he is determined to keep at a distance. She hated Steven then, as passion hates. He had come before now in a downright bad temper and was the old, irritable Steven who found fault with everything she said and did. And she had loved him for it as she had loved the old Steven. It was his queer way of showing that he loved her.
But he had not been like that for a very long time. He had grown gentler as he had grown older.
To-day he showed her more than one of his familiar moods. She took them gladly as so many signs of his unchanging nature.
He still kept up his way of coming in, the careful closing of the door, the slight pause there by the threshold, the look that sought her and that held her for an instant before their hands met.
She saw it still as the look that pleaded with her while it caressed her, that said, "I know we oughtn't to be so pleased to see each other, but we can't help it, can we?"
It was the look of his romantic youth.
As long as she saw it there it was nothing to her that Rowcliffe had changed physically, that he moved more heavily, that his keenness and his slenderness were going, that she saw also a slight thickening of his fine nose, a perceptible slackening of the taut muscles of his mouth, and a decided fulness about his jaw and chin. She saw all these things; but she did not see that his romantic youth lay dying in the pathos of his eyes and that if it pleaded still it pleaded forgiveness for the sin of dying.