"Go on," said Richard, falling to work again with a kind of galvanic action. "Go on, please."
"I have a serious grievance. Frankly, I am hurt by your preoccupation and indifference, your want of openness or cordiality,--I don't know how to name it. You are the only person who seems to be unaware that I escaped a great danger a month ago. I am obliged to remember all the agreeable hours I have spent in the studio to keep off the impression that during my illness you got used to not seeing me, and that now my presence somehow obstructs your work and annoys you."
Richard threw his chisel on the bench, and crossed over to the window where Margaret was.
"You are as wrong as you can be," he said, looking down on her half-lifted face, from which a quick wave of color was subsiding; for the abruptness of Richard's movement had startled her.
"I am glad if I am wrong."
"It is nearly an unforgivable thing to be as wide of the mark as you are. Oh, Margaret, if you had died that time!"
"You would have been very sorry?"
"Sorry? No. That doesn't express it; one outlives mere sorrow. If anything had happened to you, I should never have got over it. You don't know what those five weeks were to me. It was a kind of death to come to this room day after day, and not find you."
Margaret rested her eyes thoughtfully on the space occupied by Richard rather than on Richard himself, seeming to look through and beyond him, as if he were incorporeal.
"You missed me like that?" she said slowly.