You have been doing too much.' 'No, it isn't that,' she replied.

'One thinks of things, that's all.' She bent her head and was silent for a little, tracing a pattern on the table-cloth with a finger absently.

Then she added in a low voice, 'I suppose few women ever think at all until after they are married.' The voice was low, and Fielding was conscious of something new in the tone of it, a deeper vibration, a sincerity different in kind from that surface frankness which he had always known in her.

He wondered whether she had struck down from her pinchbeck sentimentality into something that rang solid in the depths of her nature.

He looked at her again, her eyes were turned to his.