“Oh, I know,” he replied. His vision of the room, and of the three, was so sifted and precise. “Sometimes you sing?” he prompted her.
“Mr. Calladine leans over the piano, when I sing,” she said, looking at him big-eyed.
“That frightens you?” he said, more as a statement than as a question.
“A little,” she said, telling him what she had thought she could never tell to a soul. “He seems so soft, and yet so hungry.” Her voice sank.
Lovel understood; he nodded.
“If he would sit away in the corner,” continued Clare, “I should not be afraid of him. It is his leaning over me like that. It makes me look at him all the while I sing. But he likes my singing; he asks me to do it, and he will not let me refuse.”
“And sometimes you walk in the garden,” he said, still in the same voice, as though he were looking at a tiny picture seen down the end of a long vista; “does he frighten you then?”
“Less out of doors; less when we are not shut in. I avoid the trees; being under them is more like having a ceiling over our heads. I keep to the lawn.—He is more in his place, within doors,” she said, making a discovery which answered many of her problems.
“Lamplight suits him,” said Lovel, his perceptions very clear and malicious.