She let him do as he would, accepting her cup at his hands, drinking obediently, trying to eat; patient, but not at all understanding him. The winter sun streamed in red, shining in her hair, making lights in its curling darkness; it even lent a fictitious pink to her cheek as she sat, so soberly, facing the man in whose house she was, whose ring was on her finger. When she turned her head a little the glimmer died. Irrelevantly—why should the thing strike him then?—he likened her paleness to the creamy tint of the hawthorn blossom, warm, and smoother than the wintry white of the sloe. She had been ill, too; she was very fragile.
All the while she dared hardly glance at him, though she knew that he was regarding her, not with the righteous wrath of a swindled Briton whose house was his castle, but with a strange expression that, less comprehensible, was little less alarming. The situation seemed to amuse him.... And it was like a scene in a play; intimate, domestic, and yet unreal. They were obliged to sit so close at the confidential little table, with its clinking china, and its neighbouring row of silver dishes keeping warm in the fender.... She had a wild fancy that if she thrust her hand in that fire that leapt and crackled so naturally it would not burn.
"Well," he said suddenly. "What's to be done?"
He had risen and come round to her side; the little delay was over. They had finished breakfast....
"I don't know," she said. "I am at your mercy."
"Do you mind if I smoke?"
His matter-of-fact politeness, as he waited with the cigarette unlit between his fingers, provoked in her a fugitive smile.
"There!" he said. "You are beginning to see the funny side of it too, as I do. A man who has knocked about the world as I have doesn't bluster like a Pharisee and a brute, unless he is mad,—or angry. What on earth could I do to you?"
"Are you not—angry?" she asked faintly.
"Not exactly," said Barnaby. "I am rather astonished at your pluck. Of course, it was frightfully dangerous, and you have got us both into a hole.—I'm not going to preach at you——"