Page:The Prussian officer, and other stories, Lawrence, 1914.djvu/175

 putting the scissors aside. She turned to the window. He noticed the fine, fair down on her cheek and her upper lip, and her soft, white neck, like the throat of a nettle flower, and her fore-arms, bright as newly blanched kernels. He was looking at her with new eyes, and she was a different person to him. He did not know her. But he could regard her objectively now.

“Shall we go out awhile?” she asked.

“Yes!” he answered. But the predominant emotion, that troubled the excitement and perplexity of his heart, was fear, fear of that which he saw. There was about her the same manner, the same intonation in her voice, now as then, but she was not what he had known her to be. He knew quite well what she had been for him. And gradually he was realizing that she was something quite other, and always had been.

She put no covering on her head, merely took off her apron, saying, “We will go by the larches.” As they passed the old orchard, she called him in to show him a blue-tit’s nest in one of the apple trees, and a sycock’s in the hedge. He rather wondered at her surety, at a certain hardness like arrogance hidden under her humility.

“Look at the apple buds,” she said, and he then perceived myriads of little scarlet balls among the drooping boughs. Watching his face, her eyes went hard. She saw the scales were fallen from him, and at last he was going to see her as she was. It was the thing she had most dreaded in the past, and most needed, for her soul’s sake. Now he was going to see her as she was. He would not love her, and he