The judge’s answer to this was a look which penetrated like a flash of light into her brain.  By this light she read all that he thought of her, and she saw that he was divided between admiration of her spirit and an uneasy suspicion of its perfect propriety.  Tier offence, she knew, was that, being by all the logic of facts an unhappy wife, she should persist so stubbornly in denying the visible evidence of her unhappiness.  Had her denial been merely a pretence, it would, according to his code, have appeared both natural and womanly; but the conviction that she was sincere, that she was not lying, that she was not even tragically “keeping up an appearance,” increased the amazement and suspicion with which he had begun to regard her.  He walked on thoughtfully at her side, fingering the end of his long yellowish-gray moustache, and bending his sleepy gaze on the pavement.  When he was thinking, he always looked as if he were falling asleep, and he seldom made a remark, even to a woman, without thinking it over.  Into his small steel-gray eyes, surrounded by purplish and wrinkled puffs of skin, there crept the cautious and secretive look he wore at directors’ meetings, while a furtive smile flickered for an instant across his loose mouth under the drooping ends of his moustache.  His ungainly body, with its curious suggestion of over-ripeness, of waning power, straightened suddenly as if in reaction from certain destructive processes within his soul.  Though he was only just passing his prime, he had lived so rapidly that he bore already the marks of age in his face and figure.

“Yes, it’s good to be alive,” he assented, for there was nothing in either his philosophy or his experience to contradict this simple statement.  “I’ve always maintained, by the way, that happiness is the chief of the virtues.”

For an instant Gabriella looked at the sky; then turning her candid eyes to his, she answered:  “Happiness and courage.  I put courage first—­before everything.”

Her gaze dropped, but not until she had seen his look change and the slightly cynical smile—­the smile of one who has examined everything and believes in nothing—­fade from his lips.  She had touched some chord deep down within him of which he had long ago forgotten even the existence—­some echoed harmony of what had been perhaps the living faith of his youth.

“You’re a gallant soul,” he said briefly, and she wondered what it was that he knew, what it was that he was keeping back.

At the corner where they parted, he stood for a few moments, holding her hand in his big, soft grasp while he looked down on her.  The suspicion and the cynicism had gone from his face, and she understood all at once why people still trusted him, still liked him, notwithstanding his reputation, notwithstanding even his repulsiveness.  He was all that—­he was immoral, he was repulsive—­but he was something else also—­he was human.