"There is something in you, Louis, which is fatal to the better side of me."
"The other Virginia couldn't endure me, I know."
"My other self learned to love your better self."
"I have none—"
"I have seen it revealed in—"
"Oh, yes," he laughed, "revealed in what you used to call one of my infernal flashes of chivalry."
"Yes," she said quietly, "in that."
He sat very still there in the afternoon sunshine, pondering; and sometimes his gaze searched the valley depths below, lost among the tree-tops; sometimes he studied the far horizon where the little blue hills stood up against the sky like little blue waves at sea. His hat was off; the cliff breeze played with his dark curly hair, lifting it at the temples, stirring the one obstinate strand that never lay quite flat on the crown of his head.
Twice she looked around as though to interrupt his preoccupation, but he neither responded nor even seemed to be aware of her; and she sighed imperceptibly and followed his errant eyes with her own.
At last: