‘Oh, poor M. de Chateauvieux!’ she cried after a long pause, looking up to him.  ‘How will he live without her?  He will feel himself so forsaken!’

‘Yes,’ said Kendal huskily; ’he will be very lonely, but—­one must learn to bear it.’

She gazed at him with quick startled sympathy, and all her womanly nature seemed to rise into her upturned face and yearning eyes.  It was as though her attention had been specially recalled to him; as though his particular loss and sorrow were brusquely brought home to her.  And then she was struck by the strangeness and unexpectedness of such a meeting between them.  He had been to her a judge, an authority, an embodied standard.  His high-mindedness had won her confidence; his affection for his sister had touched and charmed her.  But she had never been conscious of any intimacy with him.  Still less had she ever dreamt of sharing a common grief with him, of weeping at his side.  And the contrast between her old relation with him and this new solemn experience, rushing in upon her, filled her with emotion.  The memory of the Nuneham day woke again in her—­of the shock between her nature and his, of her overwhelming sense of the intellectual difference between them, and then of the thrill which his verdict upon Elvira had stirred in her.  The relation which she had regarded as a mere intellectual and friendly one, but which had been far more real and important to her than even she herself had ever guessed, seemed to have transformed itself since he had entered the room into something close and personal.  His last words had called up in her a sharp impression of the man’s inmost nature as it was, beneath the polished scholarly surface.  They had appealed to her on the simplest, commonest, human ground; she felt them impulsively as a call from him to her, and her own heart overflowed.

She rose, and went near to him, bending towards him like a spirit of healing, her whole soul in her eyes ‘Oh, I am so sorry for you!’ she exclaimed, and again the quick tears dropped.  ’I know it is no common loss to you.  You were so much more to each other than brother and sister often are.  It is terrible for you.’

His whole man was stirred by her pity, by the eager expansiveness of her sympathy.

‘Say it again!’ he murmured, as their eyes met; ’say it again.  It is so sweet—­from you!’

There was a long pause; she stood as if fascinated, her hands falling slowly beside her.  Her gaze wavered till the eyelids fell, and she stood absolutely motionless, the tears still on her cheek.  The strange intoxicating force of feeling, set in motion by sorrow and pity, and the unsuspected influence of his love, was sweeping them out into deep waters.  She could hardly breathe, but as he watched her all the manhood in him rose, and from the midst of grief put forward an imperious claim to the beloved and beautiful woman before him.  He came forward a step, took the cold, unresisting hands, and, bending before her, pressed them to his lips, while her bewildered eyes looked down upon him.