Progress

"It is all so muddled to me. Sometimes it seems as if I had waited years for the sight of your face, and then again it would seem only the day before that I had seen you. Sometimes I saw you so clearly that I thought you were in the room, only I never could get you to speak to me. And I never could touch you. The moment I thought you were coming nearer you went away altogether. That was what bothered me. I suppose it was imagination or some kind of delirium, but it was rather dreadful, for when I couldn't see you everything was swallowed up in a horrible darkness. It was only when you came that there was daylight at all, the rest was a dreadful night."

"Don't talk of it," she had begged him, "it is over now." And seeing that the subject distressed her he had not spoken of it again.

Philippa found no difficulty in amusing him, or distracting his attention from anything which her intuition warned her might lead to dangerous questioning. She sang to him, and read to him, choosing lighter stories from the magazines, and preferably those in which the plot was laid in other countries or in previous centuries. He showed no signs of bewilderment when such events as the Indian Mutiny or the French Revolution were mentioned, and the girl could not be sure whether he listened without comprehending, for the mere pleasure of hearing her voice and knowing her companionship, or whether some feeling of half-shamed reticence prevented his acknowledging that he had never heard of these things before.