“You are the only person in the world I could say that to.”
“Do you know why?”
The words were half whispered, but she looked at him full and clearly.
“Because you are yourself, I suppose—your good opinion dear to me, your sympathy a necessity.”
“And all that because you know I believe in you.”
Her eyes fell beneath his gaze, which was stern and yet half pleading. Then she raised them again slowly, with the delicious upward sweep of her lashes, and repeated—
“I believe in you.”
A thrill ran through the man; his dark, powerful face lit up. Lady Phayre shifted her attitude, and broke into a silvery laugh.
“And all this time you are not eating. If you don’t begin at once I shall go away.”
Goddard laughed shamefacedly, with a vague consciousness that he had been ungracious in not having commenced before. He helped himself to the salmon. After the first mouthful or two his aversion to food disappeared, and he went on eating with the appetite of a bigframed, very hungry man. With the exception of a sandwich and a glass of beer at the station bar before starting, he had eaten nothing since his early breakfast. The food and the wine restored his physical well-being. Lady Phayre looked on, pleased, she could scarcely tell why. These big, earnest men were sometimes like babies—so helpless, if left to themselves. She tended on him now and then in a pretty way without leaving her seat, passed his plate, handed him the little silver jug of cream, and, when the meal was over, fetched from a cupboard a box of cigarettes. Like a man unaccustomed to delicate feminine ministrations, Goddard accepted them rather tongue-tied, with a certain tremulous bashfulness. The little hospitable actions, so homely and therefore charming to a man of gentler nurture, were to him full of a rare exotic sweetness. All through the meal she exerted herself to talk to him brightly of little things, incidents that had brought them into pleasant contact during the late struggle. He finished his cigarette, and they returned to the drawingroom.