On his part he saw, seated in her motor car, a woman whom he would have given all that he possessed to have taken in his arms and kept there. His acumen was greater, perhaps, than hers; he saw with a clearness which frightened him, her dire distress, the weight of trouble which bore her down. She might think that she hid it from the world, but, to him, it was as though the flesh had been stripped from her nerves, and he saw them quivering. He knew something of this girl's story; this woman whose childhood should have been scarcely yet behind her, and he knew that it had brought that upon her face which had no right to be there even though her years had attained to the Psalmist's span. And because his whole nature burned within him with a desire that she might be to him as never woman had been before, he was unmanned. He was possessed by so many emotions, all warring with each other, that, for the moment, he was like a helmless ship, borne this way and that, he knew not why or whither.
Then she was so hard, looked at him out of eyes which were so cold, spoke to him as if it were only because she was compelled that she spoke to him at all. How could he dare to hint--though only in a whisper--at sympathy, or comfort? He knew that she would resent it as bitterly as though he had lashed her with a whip. And, deeming herself the victim of an outrage, the probabilities were that she would snatch the supposititious weapon out of his hand and strike him with all her force with the butt of it.
So that, in the end, her trouble would be worse at the end than it had been at the beginning. He felt that this was a woman who would dree her own weird, and that from him, of all men in the world, she would brook only such interference, either by deed word, as she herself might choose to demand.
When they had done studying one another she put her hand up to her face, as if to brush away cobwebs which might have been spun before her eyes, and she asked,--
"Shall we talk here?"
His tone was as stiff and formal as hers had been.
"As you please. It depends upon the length to which our conversation is likely to extend. As I think it possible that what you have to say may not be capable of compression within the limits of a dozen words, I would, suggest that you should draw your car a little to one side here, where it would not be possible for the most imaginative policeman to regard it as an obstruction to the traffic which seldom or never comes this way; and that you should then descend from it, and say what you have to say under the shade of these trees, and in the neighbourhood of this stile."
She acted on his suggestion, and took off the long dust cloak which she was wearing, and tossed it on the seat of her car. Going to the stile she leaned one hand on the cross bar. He held out his pipe towards her.
"May I smoke?"
"Certainly, why not? I think it possible that you may require its soothing influence before we have gone very far."