To-day he showed her more than one of his familiar moods.  She took them gladly as so many signs of his unchanging nature.

He still kept up his way of coming in, the careful closing of the door, the slight pause there by the threshold, the look that sought her and that held her for an instant before their hands met.

She saw it still as the look that pleaded with her while it caressed her, that said, “I know we oughtn’t to be so pleased to see each other, but we can’t help it, can we?”

It was the look of his romantic youth.

As long as she saw it there it was nothing to her that Rowcliffe had changed physically, that he moved more heavily, that his keenness and his slenderness were going, that she saw also a slight thickening of his fine nose, a perceptible slackening of the taut muscles of his mouth, and a decided fulness about his jaw and chin.  She saw all these things; but she did not see that his romantic youth lay dying in the pathos of his eyes and that if it pleaded still it pleaded forgiveness for the sin of dying.

His hand fell slackly from hers as she took it.

It was as if they were still on their guard, still afraid of each other’s touch.

As he sat in the chair that faced hers he held his hands clasped loosely in front of him, and looked at them with a curious attention, as if he wondered what kind of hands they were that could resist holding her.

When he saw that she was looking at him they fell apart with a nervous gesture.

They picked up the book she had laid down and turned it.  His eyes examined the title page.  Their pathos lightened and softened; it became compassion; they smiled at her with a little pitiful smile, half tender, half ironic, as if they said, “Poor Gwenda, is that what you’re driven to?”

He opened the book and turned the pages, reading a little here and there.

He scowled.  His look changed.  It darkened.  It was angry, resentful, inimical.  The dying youth in it came a little nearer to death.

Rowcliffe had found that he could not understand what he had read.

“Huh!  What do you addle your brains with that stuff for?” he said.

“It amuses me.”

“Oh—­so long as you’re amused.”

He pushed away the book that had offended him.

They talked—­about the Vicar, about Alice, about Rowcliffe’s children, about the changes in the Dale, the coming of the Maceys and the going of young Grierson.

“He wasn’t a bad chap, Grierson.”

He softened, remembering Grierson.

“I can’t think why you didn’t care about him.”

And at the thought of how Gwenda might have cared for Grierson and hadn’t cared his youth revived; it came back into his eyes and lit them; it passed into his scowling face and caressed and smoothed it to the perfect look of reminiscent satisfaction.  Rowcliffe did not know, neither did she, how his egoism hung upon her passion, how it drew from it food and fire.