"You're very good to be so sorry for me," she whispered.
He made a swift gesture of protest. "There's one thing I can't stand—to see a woman suffer."
She waited a moment, as if to take in his words, and then motioned him to the seat beside her. When she spoke again, it was slowly, as if she were trying to concentrate her mind:
"You have known sorrow?"
"Yes."
"Tell me."
He saw that she wished to forget her own trouble for a moment in that of another, yet the effort to obey evidently cost him much. They had both spoken as if they two were alone in the room. Dosia, who had withdrawn to the ottoman some paces away, out of the radius of the lamp, sat there in her white cotton frock, leaning a little forward, her hands clasped loosely in her lap, her face upraised and her eyes looking somewhere beyond. So still was she, so gentle, so fair, that she might have been a spirit outside the stormy circle in which these two communed. (In such moments as these she prayed for Lawson.)
"I"—it was Girard who spoke at last—"my mother—Cater said once that he'd told you something about me."
"Yes, I remember."
"I was so little when we drifted off. I didn't know how to help, how to save anything. Yet it has always seemed to me since that I ought to have known—I ought to have known!" His hands clenched; his voice had subsided to a groan.