He sought relief.

Perhaps he sought it from me because I was as apart as a woman from his physical splendour, a kind of bodiless creature with just a brain and a human heart, the ghost of an old soldier, far away from the sphere of poor passions and little jealousies.
I felt the tentacles of the man's nature blindly and convulsively groping after something within me that eluded them.

That is the best way in which I can describe the psychology of these strange moments.
The morning sun streamed into my little oak-panelled dining-room and caught the silver and fruit on the breakfast table and made my frieze of old Delft glow blue like the responsive western sky.

With his back to the vivid window, Leonard Boyce stood cut out black like a silhouette.

That he, too, felt the tension, I know; for a wasp crawled over his face, from cheek-bone, across his temples, to his hair, and he did not notice it.
Instinctively I said the words: "Your record.