“All right,” he murmured stupidly. “I’ll go wherever you want me to go, my dear.” And when he found that she still watched him with a sort of pondering detachment, he made a hopeless effort to read her thoughts.

Her look seemed to express resentment, superiority, irony; and yet there was tenderness in it too, and a sort of pitiful indulgence. It was one of those looks in which everything that is most obscure in the relation between two people rises to the surface and can find no expression in human words. All he knew was that this look of hers let him off and did not let him off; though what she could know of the vague, secret thoughts that had been his that day, he could not conceive!

“I’ll go anywhere you like, Gerda,” he repeated lamely; and in order to break this spell, he took up a cloth duster she had laid on the back of a chair, and made a motion to dust the chimneypiece.