“Is it you?”
The light was behind her, and her face vague and shadowy, but he had a feeling that she was afraid. Her bare white forearms, with the hands resting on the window-sill, looked hard and rigid.
“Have I frightened you?”
“Perhaps—a little.”
“I wanted to talk to you.”
She did not answer him for the moment.
“I am all alone to-night.”
“I thought you had the girl with you.”
“I let her go down to the village.”
He had come to her in a fog of mystical love, and through the haze of his vision her set and human face became the one real thing in the world. Her voice had a wounded sound, and she spoke as from a little distance. There was resistance here, a bleak dread of something, and yet a desire that what was inevitable should be understood.