“It is over hard.”
She smiled, and there was a look of strange happiness upon her face. Perhaps the man’s sympathy was more to her than either of them had realized. Gabriel had forgotten for a moment the eternal bathos of modernity.
“I would that I could help you,” he said.
Joan’s eyes were turned suddenly to his.
“You have helped me,” she answered.
“I?”
“Yes.”
“How?”
“You have often been in my thoughts,” she said. “Pardon me if I seem too much a child. I have never been taught the shame of speaking what is uppermost in my mind. I am vastly ignorant.”
“You are wiser than I am.”