He had looked at her while he spoke, but on finishing looked off at the sea again and continued to agitate his foot. He knew now what he had done and why; and the sense of her fixed dark eyes on him during his speech and after didn’t alter his small contentment. Yet even when she still said nothing he didn’t turn round; he simply kept his corner as if _that_ were his point made, should it even be the last word between them. It might have been, for that matter, from the way in which she presently rose, gathering herself, her fine umbrella and her very small smart reticule, in the construction of which shining gilt much figured, well together, and, after standing another instant, moved across to the rail of the terrace as she had done before and remained, as before, with her back to him, though this time, it well might be, under a different fear. A quarter of an hour ago she hadn’t tried him, and had had that anxiety; now that she had tried him it wasn’t easier--but she was thinking what she still could do. He left her to think--nothing in fact more interesting than the way she might decide had ever happened to him; but it was a part of this also that as she turned round and came nearer again he didn’t rise, he gave her no help. If she got any, at least, from his looking up at her only, meeting her fixed eyes once more in silence, that was her own affair. “You must think,” she said--“you must take all your time, but I shall be at home.” She left it to him thus--she insisted, with her idea, on leaving him something too. And on her side as well she showed an art--which resulted, after another instant, in his having to rise to his feet. He flushed afresh as he did it--it exposed him so shabbily the more; and now if she took him in, with each of his seedy items, from head to foot, he didn’t and couldn’t and wouldn’t know it, attaching his eyes hard and straight to something quite away from them. It stuck in his throat to say he’d come, but she had so curious a way with her that he still less could say he wouldn’t, and in a moment had taken refuge in something that was neither. “Are you married?”--he put it to her with that plainness, though it had seemed before he said it to do more for him than while she waited before replying. “No, I’m not married,” she said; and then had another wait that might have amounted to a question of what this had to do with it.