The discovery no more gave him suspicion that she was at fault in sympathy than of itself it vexed him, as one commonly might be vexed in such a case. It was himself he blamed when, recalling how he had talked and how little had been her response, he feared that he had tired her by his enthusiasms or, as reproaching himself he termed them, his meanderings. Clumsy he called himself, inept, dull-witted; and pictured her, his darling and his goddess, his frozen, rarest, perfect Snow-White-and-Rose-Red, and hated to have blundered all his dulness on so rare and exquisite a thing. Glad, then, the finding that he could entertain her by exercise of what a thousand-fold entranced himself--by encouraging her to speak of herself, her doings, her reflections, just as in the drive in that hour when first he knew he loved her she had spoken of her school. Lightest and most prattling what she told, and light and very passing what she thought; but spoken in her quaintly precise mode of speech and in her cold, high tone, and bringing from her her cold little laugh, and on her cold white cheek lighting those flames of colour. When he watched her with others he saw her perfect face set in its strangely still, aloof expression; when she spoke with him, and spoke of herself, he was content only to listen so he might see it light and sometimes see their secret make it flame. More than once while she so spoke and he so listened, "But I told you that," she would say; "I perfectly recollect telling you." And he: "Well, tell me again;" and at the note of his voice she would seem to catch her breath as though some sharpness checked her breathing, and he would see their secret flutter in her eyes and see it stain its signal like a red rose on her cheeks. II It was by one definite step--not observed as such by him at the time nor any significance in it apprehended--that they passed from this stage of reserve on the matter between them and came towards its open entertainment. The afternoon following Rollo's departure with Lady Burdon on the long foreign tour marked the event, and Percival, meeting Dora by chance, was in some loss of spirits at the fact. He found her in very different case. Her mood was high. She had the air of one who has made a success or who has escaped some shadowing mischief. He could suppose no cause for such a thing or he would have said her bearing signified relief, removal of some oppression, freedom from some weight that had burdened her mind and that now, displaced, suffered her mind to run up, made her tread lighter. "There's something different about you to-day," he told her; then, while she laughed, and while he caught more glee than commonly he knew in the little sound he loved to hear, found the exact expression for the change he saw, and named the new step in their relations--"You are as if you'd suddenly got a holiday."