One by one, holding a blue-bordered napkin in his hands, he dried each cup, each saucer, each plate, each knife, each spoon, as Gerda handed them to him out of the wash-pan in the sink. Sometimes in light, sometimes in shadow, as his own figure came between her and the two candles on the table, her face still showed fluctuating signs of uneasiness. But these signs grew fewer and fewer as he told her about Miss Gault and her sandwiches, about the waiter at the Lovelace having become a beggar, about the extreme emptiness of the outgoing train and its crowded state returning, about the crafty old man with a white cat⁠—he suppressed all mention of Mattie and Olwen⁠—until at last an expression came into her face that he knew well, an expression of sleepy, infantile amusement.

He paused in his narration directly he caught sight of that look, and hung up the blue-bordered drying-cloth in its place and proceeded to wash his own hands at the tap.