“Yes, very much,” she answered, in her soft and delicate voice.
“Beattie, I believe you live by that,” he said, almost bruskly.
Suddenly he felt aware of a peculiar sort of strength in her, in her softness, a strength not at all as of iron, mysterious and tenacious.
“Dear old Beattie!” he said.
Moisture had sprung into his eyes.
“How lonely our lives are,” he continued, looking at her now with a sort of deep curiosity. “The lives of all of us. I don’t care who it is, man, woman, child, he or she, every one’s lonely. And yet——”
A doubt had surely struck him. He sat very still for a minute.
“When I think of Rosamund I can’t think of her as lonely.”
“Can’t you?”
“No. Somehow it seems as if she always had a companion with her.”