It was a grey day, the river was in fog, but the air was windless and mild.
She threw back her veil and the pale light fell on the brightness of her hair, and the beauty of her face enhanced by the frame of crape. The traces of her weeping had passed away, leaving her face softer and whiter than usual with a tremor on the mouth like that of a little child who has been scolded.
William Massarene’s observant eyes read those signs. “She’s in some real sharp trouble this time, I reckon,” he said to himself.
He was a man who had never known pity, but he did feel sorry for her.
She made the mistake of judging him from the exterior. Because he was afraid of her and of her friends, because he did not know how to bow, because he made ludicrous mistakes in language and manner, because he crumbled his bread on the dinner-cloth, and never used his finger-glass, she imagined him to be a fool.
She did not understand that if he let himself be robbed he did so with a purpose and not out of feebleness. She did not understand that, although he was hypnotized by her because he was under the influence of a woman for the first time, there was always alive underneath his obedience the sharp, keen, brutal selfishness which had made him the great man he was.
“What is the trouble, my lady?” he said, leaning forward, his hands on his knees in his usual attitude. “Why, lord, you’re no more made for trouble than a white cockatoo’s for mud and rain.”
There was not a soul on the terrace; the attendant who had brought the tea-tray had retired; there was the scream and roar of a steam-tug coming up the river in the fog, and a factory bell on the opposite shore was clanging loudly: she thought she should hear those two sounds in her ears as long as ever she should live.
She knew that there was no time to lose, that the moments were tearing along like sleuth-hounds, that she must tell him now or never, must get his help or be ruined.
She was of high physical courage; she had slid from the back of a rearing horse; she had never lost her nerve on a yacht-deck in a storm, when men were washed overboard like chickens; she had been perfectly cool and self-possessed one awful night on a Highland mountain when she and her whole party had lost their way for twelve hours of snow-drift and hurricane; but now, for the first time in her life, she was nerveless, and felt her tongue cleave to the roof of her mouth and her spirit fail her.