“I am glad if I rest you, David—I think you need rest.”
“You sit so still. No one else sits so still.”
Elizabeth laughed softly.
“That sounds as if I were a very inert sort of person,” she said.
David frowned a little.
“No, it’s not that. It is strength—force—stability. Only strong things keep still like that.”
This was so like the old David, that it took Elizabeth back ten years at a leap. She was silent for a moment, gathering her courage. Then she said:
“David, you do need rest, and a change. Why don’t you go away?”
She had thought he would be angry, but he was not angry. Instead, he answered her as the David of ten years ago might have done, with a misquotation.
“What is the good of a change? It’s a case of—I myself am my own Heaven and Hell”; and his voice was the voice of a very weary man.