“That was what seemed so strange.”
She stood a moment gazing through the window at the flowers in the border, yet trying to penetrate by sheer instinct beyond the man’s quiet dignity. John Gore remembered his father’s innuendos. It had been a pitiable affair for an innocent girl. It would have been even more pitiable had she been confronted with what my lord had hinted to be the truth.
“Does the thrust of a sword hurt? I have often wondered.”
Her eyes were fixed upon him, as though she had discovered the slightest flicker of uneasiness, a length of silence that suggested premeditation.
“Why think of such things?”
“One cannot always help one’s thoughts; they come like the wind through the window.”
John Gore leaned his head upon his hand, his fingers tugging at his hair, much like a school-boy baffled by a pile of figures. Man of action, and of the world that he was, his ways were often quaintly boyish.
“There may be one pang, perhaps.”
“The thought of steel in one’s body makes one shiver.”
She seemed to persist in her morbid melancholy like one whose thoughts move in a circle.