When he looked up her eyes were fixed on him.

She was looking at him--not, Gregory felt, as she had ever looked at him before; not as though he were a stump or a stone that chance had thrown in her way.

Tonight, whether it were critically, or kindly, or unkindly, he could not tell, but she looked at him, at the man, Gregory Rose, with attention.

A vague elation filled him.

He clinched his fist tight to think of some good idea he might express to her; but of all those profound things he had pictured himself as saying to her, when he sat alone in the daub-and-wattle house, not one came.