He did not know that the mother-heart in her was yearning over him with a tenderness almost too powerful to be resisted, and that his weakness was constraining her as his strength had never done.

He was rather surprised that she did not speak to him; but with the patient simplicity of a strong man he accepted her behaviour without questioning it.

Her mere presence in the room somehow changed everything, and made him feel that no world which contained Elisabeth could ever be an entirely sorrowful world.

Of course he knew nothing about the new Christopher which had suddenly arisen above Elisabeth's horizon; he was far too masculine to understand that his own pathos could be pathetic, or his own suffering dramatic.

It is only women--or men who have much of the woman in their composition--who can say: "Here I and sorrow sit, This is my throne; let kings come bow to it." The thoroughly manly man is incapable of seeing the picturesque effect of his own misery.
So Christopher pulled himself together and tried to talk of trivial things; and Miss Farringdon, having walked through the dark valley herself, knew the comfort of the commonplace therein, and fell in with his mood, discussing nurses and remedies and domestic arrangements and the like.