heart, the true face owned all, and said, in its own frank, simple
language--I am sorry for him; I am sorry for myself.

It said this, and more, which I could not then interpret. I
understood but too well the change in her manner, to greater
kindness and quicker readiness in interpreting all my wishes,
before others--to constraint and sadness, and nervous anxiety to
absorb herself in the first occupation she could seize on,
whenever we happened to be left together alone. I understood why
the sweet sensitive lips smiled so rarely and so restrainedly now,
and why the clear blue eyes looked at me, sometimes with the pity
of an angel, sometimes with the innocent perplexity of a child.
But the change meant more than this. There was a coldness in her
hand, there was an unnatural immobility in her face, there was in
all her movements the mute expression of constant fear and
clinging self-reproach. The sensations that I could trace to
herself and to me, the unacknowledged sensations that we were
feeling in common, were not these. There were certain elements of
the change in her that were still secretly drawing us together,
and others that were, as secretly, beginning to drive us apart.

In my doubt and perplexity, in my vague suspicion of something
hidden which I was left to find by my own unaided efforts, I
examined Miss Halcombe's looks and manner for enlightenment.
Living in such intimacy as ours, no serious alteration could take
place in any one of us which did not sympathetically affect the
others. The change in Miss Fairlie was reflected in her half-
sister. Although not a word escaped Miss Halcombe which hinted at
an altered state of feeling towards myself, her penetrating eyes
had contracted a new habit of always watching me. Sometimes the