Taking an order, his whole self had changed, glazed over with a sort of hardness and distance. Connie hesitated, she ought to go. But she looked round the clean, tidy, rather dreary little sitting-room with something like dismay.
"Do you live here quite alone?" she asked.
"Quite alone, your Ladyship."
"But your mother. . .?"
"She lives in her own cottage in the village."
"With the child?" asked Connie.
"With the child!"
And his plain, rather worn face took on an indefinable look of derision. It was a face that changed all the time, baffling.
"No," he said, seeing Connie stand at a loss, "my mother comes and cleans up for me on Saturdays; I do the rest myself."
Again Connie looked at him. His eyes were smiling again, a little mockingly, but warm and blue, and somehow kind. She wondered at him. He was in trousers and flannel shirt and a grey tie, his hair soft and damp, his face rather pale and worn-looking. When the eyes ceased to laugh they looked as if they had suffered a great deal, still without losing their warmth. But a pallor of isolation came over him, she was not really there for him.
She wanted to say so many things, and she said nothing. Only she looked up at him again, and remarked:
"I hope I didn't disturb you?"
The faint smile of mockery narrowed his eyes.
"Only combing my hair, if you don't mind. I'm sorry I hadn't a coat on, but then I had no idea who was knocking, Nobody knocks here, and the unexpected sounds ominous."
He went in front of her down the garden path to hold the gate. In his shirt, without the clumsy velveteen coat, she saw again how slender he was, thin, stooping a little. Yet, as she passed him, there was something young and bright in his fair hair, and his quick eyes. He would be a man about thirty-seven or eight.
She plodded on into the wood, knowing he was looking after her; he upset her so much, in spite of herself.
And he, as he went indoors, was thinking: "She's nice, she's real! she's nicer than she knows."
She wondered very much about him; he seemed so unlike a gamekeeper, so unlike a working-man anyhow; although he had
