They stood for a long time in silence, Gregory leaning beside her and looking down at the sea. His thought was not with the stricken figure she put before him; it dwelt on the girl facing horror, on the child bearing more than a child should bear. Yet he was glad to feel, as a background to his thoughts, that Madame von Marwitz was indeed very pitiful. "You understand," said Karen, straightening herself at last and laying her hands on the wall. "You see how it is." "Yes," said Gregory. "It is kind of you, and beautiful, to feel me, as your friend, a person of value," said Karen. "But it does not please me to have the great fact of my life belittled." "I haven't meant to do that, really. I see why it means so much, to you. But I see you before I see the facts of your life; they interest me because of you," said Gregory. "You come first to me. It's that I want you to understand." Karen had at last turned her eyes upon his and they met them in a long encounter that recalled to Gregory their first. It was not the moment for explicit recognitions or avowals; the shadow of the past lay too darkly upon her. But that their relation had changed her deepened gaze accepted. She took his hand, she had a fashion almost boyish of taking his rather than giving her hand, and said: "We shall both understand more and more; that is so, is it not? And some day you will know her. Until you know her you cannot really understand." CHAPTER XI Karen and he had walked back to the house in silence, and at the door, where she stood to see him off, it had been arranged that he was to lunch at Les Solitudes next day and that she was to show him a favourite headland, one not far away, but that he had never yet been shown. From the sweetness, yet gravity, of her look and voice he could infer nothing but that she recognized change and a new significance. Her manner had neither the confusion nor the pretended unconsciousness of ordinary girlhood. She was calm, but with a new thoughtfulness. He arrived a little early next day and found Mrs. Talcott alone in the morning-room writing letters. He noticed, as she rose from the bureau, her large, immature, considered writing. "Karen'll be down in a minute or two, I guess," she said. "Take a chair." "Don't let me interrupt you," said Gregory, as Mrs. Talcott seated herself before him, her hands folded at her waist. But Mrs. Talcott, remarking briefly, "Don't mention it," did not move back to her former place. She examined him and he examined her and he felt that she probed through his composure to his unrest. "I wanted a little talk," she observed presently. "You've gotten pretty fond of Karen, haven't you, Mr. Jardine?" This was to come at once to the point. "Very fond," said Gregory, wondering if she had been diagnosing his fondness in a letter to Madame von Marwitz. "She hasn't got many friends," Mrs. Talcott, after another moment of contemplation, went on. "She's always been a lonesome sort of child."