His hand trembled visibly as it dropped from hers.  He hid it in his breast pocket, where it pretended to be looking for things.

“Miss Palliser said she thought you would see me—­”

“Yes, I wanted to see you; I would have sent for you if you had not come.  Sit down, please.”

She sat down herself, in her old place at the writing table.

He took the chair beside her and leaned back, resting his arm on the table.  She turned so as to face him.

She was not so changed but that his hungry and unhappy eyes could rest on her, appeased and comforted.  And yet she was changed, too.  Her girlhood, with all its innocence of suffering, had died in her.  But the touch of that death was masterly, it had redeemed her beauty from the vagueness of its youth.  Grief, that drags or sharpens or deforms the faces of older women, had given to hers the precision that it lacked.  There was a faint sallow tinge in the whiteness of her skin, and her eyelids drooped as if she were tired to the point of exhaustion.  He noticed, too, the pathetic tension that restrained the quivering of her mouth.  It was the upper lip that trembled.

“You have been ill?” she said.

And as he answered that, “Oh, it was nothing,” he was aware for the first time how very much it had been.  She too was aware of it.

She expressed her concern; she hoped that they had looked after him well at the hotel.

Decidedly she had grown older and her manner had grown older too.  It suggested that it was she who was the protector; that she wished, as far as possible, to spare him in an interview which must necessarily be painful.  It was as if she remembered that he at any rate was young, and that these gloomy circumstances must be highly distasteful to his youth.  In that she was the same as ever; every nerve in her shrank from the pain of giving pain.

At least that was his first impression.  And then (no consoling view being really open to him) he told himself he was a fool to suppose that in the circumstances she could think of him at all.  He had nothing tangible to go upon.  He could see through it.  He could see perfectly through the smile, the self-possession, even the air of polite and leisurely interest in his illness.  She dwelt on him because he was of all themes the one most indifferent to her.  She was simply holding herself in, according to the indestructible instincts of her race.

He need not have been afraid of seeing her suffer; that, at any rate, he would not see.  To let him see it would have been to her an extreme personal degradation, an offence against the decencies of her class.  This sorrow of hers, this invisible, yet implacable sorrow, stood between them, waving him away.  It opened up again the impassable gulf.  He felt himself not only a stranger, but an inferior, separated from her beyond all possibility of approach.  She had not changed.  She had simply reverted to her type.