“Are you ill?” he asked.
She blushed suddenly.
“No, my foot got twisted in my shoe-lace.”
“The girl is lying,” he thought, with a most unpleasant shock.
He brought her into a small, clean, quaint old room, fragrant with mignonette, a bunch stood in a glass on the cottage piano and there was a long green box full of it on the window-sill.
“Now sit in here in the shade,” he said, “and take off your hat, and rest.”
He stood for a moment and watched her, then he arranged the pillows on the couch and made her lie down, with an involuntary protecting manner quite unlike his usual airs of equality and sexlessness.
That lie had made her all at once so young to him, so infinitely pathetic.
He could have taken her in his arms like a little child, and hushed her to sleep.
When he had gone she clenched her hands in a rage.