She ended on an open note. He glanced at her again and again, furtively, but with growing admiration and lessening confusion. "No!" he said. "This kind of thing suits you. You are splendid! No, I don't think you can go back." He was thinking of her in the New York flat, pale, silent, oppressing him terribly. He was the soul of gentle timidity, in his human relations, and her silent, awful hostility after the baby was born, had frightened him deeply. Because he had realised she couldn't help it. Women were like that. Their feelings took a reverse direction, even against their own selves, and it was awful--awful! Awful, awful to live in the house with a woman like that, whose feelings were reversed even against herself! He had felt himself ground down under the millstone of her helpless enmity. She had ground even herself down to the quick, and the child as well. No, anything rather than that. "But what about _you_?" she asked. "I? Oh, I!--I can carry an the business; and--er--come over here for the holidays--as long as you like to stay. You stay as long as you wish." He looked, a long time down at the earth, then glanced up at her with a touch of supplication in his uneasy eyes. "Even for ever?" "Well--er--yes, if you like. For ever is a long time. One can't set a date." "And I can: do anything I like?" She looked him straight in the eyes, challenging. And he was powerless against her rosy, wind-hardened nakedness. "Er--yes!--I suppose so! So long as you don't make yourself unhappy--or the boy." Again he looked up at her with, a complicated, uneasy appeal--thinking of the child; but hoping for himself. "I won't," she said, quickly. "No!" he said. "No! I don't think you will." There was a pause. The bells of the village were hastily clanging mid-day. That meant lunch. She slipped into her grey crepe kimono, and fastened a broad green sash round her waist. Then she slipped a little blue shirt over the boy's head, and they went up to the house. At table she watched her husband, his grey city face, hie fixed, black-grey hair, his very precise table manners, and his extreme moderation in eating and drinking. Sometimes he glanced at her, furtively, from under his black lashes. He had the gold-grey eyes of an animal that has been caught young, and reared completely in captivity. They went on to the balcony for coffee. Below, beyond, on the next podere across the steep little gully, a peasant and his wife were sitting under an almond tree, near the green wheat, eating their mid-day meal from a little white cloth spread on the ground. There was a huge piece of bread, and glasses with dark wine. Juliet put her husband with his back to this picture: she set facing. Because, the moment she and Maurice had come out on the balcony, the peasant had glanced up. V