Some one or something had schooled her, too.  Her large-eyed directness of gaze was the same as at that inn and in Wales, but her easy sedateness was novel, her English, almost the tone of the English world:  he gathered it, at least, from the few remarks below stairs.

His desire to be with her was the desire to escape the phantasm of the woman haunting to subjugate him when they were separate.  He could kill illusion by magnifying and clawing at her visible angles and audible false notes; and he did it until his recollections joined to the sight of her, when a clash of the thought of what she had been and the thought of what she was had the effect of conjuring a bitter sweet image that was a more seductive illusion.  Strange to think, this woman once loved the man who was not half the value of the man she no longer loved.  He took a shot at cynicism, but hit no mark.  This woman protected her whole sex.

They sat at the dinner-table alone, thanks to a handsome wench’s attractions for a philosopher.  Married, and parents of a lusty son, this was their first sitting at table together.  The mouth that said ’I guard my rooms’ was not obtruded; she talked passingly of her brother, much of Lady Arpington and of old Mr. Woodseer; and, though she reserved a smile, there was no look of a lock on her face.  She seemed pleased to be treated very courteously; she returned the stately politeness in exactest measure; very simply, as well.  Her face had now an air of homeliness, well suited to an English household interior.  She could chat.  Any pauses occurring, he was the one guilty of them; she did not allow them to be barrier chasms, or ‘strids’ for the leap with effort; she crossed them like the mountain maid over a gorge’s plank—­kept her tones perfectly.  Her Madge and Mr. Gower Woodseer made a conversible topic.  She was inquisitive for accounts of Spanish history and the land of Spain.

They passed into the drawing-room.  She had heard of the fate of the poor child in Wales, she said, without a comment.

‘I see now, I ought to have backed your proposal,’ he confessed, and was near on shivering.  She kept silent, proudly or regretfully.

Open on her workbasket was a Spanish guide-book and a map attached to it.  She listened to descriptions of Cadiz, Malaga, Seville, Granada.  Her curiosity was chiefly for detailed accounts of Catalonia and the Pyrenees.

’Hardly the place for you; there’s a perpetual heaving of Carlism in those mountains; your own are quieter for travellers,’ he remarked; and for a moment her lips moved to some likeness of a smile; a dimple in a flowing thought.

He remarked the come and go of it.

He regretted his inability to add to her knowledge of the Spanish
Pyrenees.

Books helped her at present, she said.

Feeling acutely that hostility would have brought them closer than her uninviting civility, he spoke of the assault on Mr. Wythan, and Gower Woodseer’s conjecture, and of his having long since discharged the rascal Ines.