He now faced around to her with a return to everyday matters.  “See here, Sylvia, I’ve just got it through my head.  Are you waiting here for that five-fifteen train to West Lydford and then are you planning to walk out to the Austin Farm?  Great Scott! don’t do that, in this heat.  I’ll just run back to the village and get a car and take you there in half an hour.”  He rose to his feet, but Sylvia sprang up quickly, catching at his arm in a panic.  “No! no!  Arnold, you don’t understand.  I haven’t written Austin a word—­he doesn’t know I’m coming.  At first in Paris I couldn’t—­I was so despicable—­and then afterwards I couldn’t either,—­though it was all right then.  There aren’t any words.  It’s all too big, too deep to talk about.  I didn’t want to, either.  I wanted to see him—­to see if he still, if he wants me now.  He could write anything.  He’d feel he’d have to.  How would I ever know but that it was only because he thought he ought to?  I thought I would just go to him all by myself, without his knowing I was coming. I can tell—­the first moment he looks at me I can tell—­for all my life, I’ll be sure, one way or the other.  That first look, what’s in him will show!  He can’t hide anything then, not even to be kind.  I’ll know!  I’ll know!”

Arnold sat down again with no comment.  Evidently he understood.  He leaned his head back against the rough bark of the pine, and closed his eyes.  There was a painful look of excessive fatigue about his whole person.  He glanced up and caught Sylvia’s compassionate gaze on him.  “I haven’t been sleeping very well lately,” he said very dryly.  “It breaks a fellow up to lose sleep.”  Sylvia nodded.  Evidently he was not minded to speak of his own troubles.  He had not mentioned Judith.

She looked up thoughtfully at the well-remembered high line of the mountain against the sky.  Her mother’s girlhood eyes had looked at that high line.  She fell into a brooding meditation, and presently, obeying one of her sure instincts, she sat down by Arnold, and began to talk to him about what she divined for the moment would most touch and move him; she began to talk about her mother.  He was silent, his worn, sallow face impassive, but she knew he was listening.

She told one incident after another of her mother’s life, incidents which, she told him, she had not noted at the time, incidents which were now windows in her own life, letting in the sunlight her mother loved so well.  “All the time I was growing up, I was blind, I didn’t see anything.  I don’t feel remorseful, I suppose that is the way children have to be.  But I didn’t see her.  There were so many minor differences between us ... tastes, interests.  I always said hatefully to myself that Mother didn’t understand me.  And it was true too.  As if it matters!  What if she didn’t!  She never talked morality to us, anyhow.  She never talked much at all.  She didn’t need to.  She was herself.  No words would express that.  She lived her life.