“Poor child!” said she softly.  Margaret’s other hand went to her eyes and hid them from sight, and her head sank forward until it touched her fingers, where they joined Miss Skeat’s.

“I am so unhappy to-night,” murmured Margaret, finding at last, in the evening hours, the sympathy she had longed for all day.  Miss Skeat changed her own position a little so as to be nearer to her.

“Poor child!” repeated Miss Skeat almost in a whisper, as she bent down to the regal head that lay against her hand, smoothing the thick hair with her worn fingers.  “Poor child, do you love him so very dearly?” She spoke almost inaudibly, and her wrinkled eyelids were wet.  But low as was her voice, Margaret heard, and moved her head in assent, without lifting it from the table.

Ah yes—­she loved him very, very much.  But she could not bear to confess it, for all that, and a moment afterwards she was sitting upright again in her chair, feeling that she had weathered the first storm.  Her companion, who was not ignorant of her ways, contented herself then with patting Margaret’s hand caressingly during the instant it remained in her own, before it was drawn away.  There was a world of kindness and of gentle humanity in the gaunt gentlewoman’s manner, showing that the heart within was not withered yet.  Then Miss Skeat flattened the book before her with the paper-cutter, and began to read.  Reading aloud had become to her a second nature, and whether she had liked it or not at first, she had learned to do it with perfect ease and indifference, neither letting her voice drag languidly and hesitatingly when she was tired, nor falling into that nerve-rending fault of readers who vainly endeavour to personate the characters in dialogue, and to give impressiveness in the descriptive portions.  She never made a remark, or asked her hearer’s opinion.  If the Countess was in the humour to sleep, the reading was soporific; if she desired to listen, she felt that her companion was not trying to bias her judgment by the introduction of dramatic intonation and effect.  With an even, untiring correctness of utterance, Miss Skeat read one book just as she read another—­M.  Thiers or Mr. Henry James, Mark Twain or a Parliamentary Report—­it was all one to her.  Poor Miss Skeat!

But to Margaret the evening seemed long and the night longer, and many days and evenings and nights afterwards.  Not that she doubted, but that she thought—­well—­perhaps she thought she ought to doubt.  Some cunning reader of face and character, laughing and making love by turns, had once told her she had more heart than head.  Every woman knows she ought to seem flattered at being considered a “person of heart,” and yet every woman cordially hates to be told so.  And, at last, Margaret began to wonder whether it were true.  Should she have admitted she loved a man who left her a moment afterwards in order to make a voyage of two months for the mere furthering of his worldly interest?  But then—­he told her he was going before he kissed her.  What could be the “other reason”?