She still stood by the great oak table, her hands resting lightly on its dark polished surface. I could see the vague reflection of her fingers reaching up through the deep solidity of the oak to join hands with her. She produced, I thought, an impressive effect of fragility and power in her contrast with that massive table. The material of her flesh was so delicate compared to the inert, formidable mass before her. She could not have lifted or moved it by her own effort. And yet it seemed that she had absolute command over that ponderous obstacle, that in some way the mobility of her spirit must give her control of it, that she might, if she wished, plunge those relatively fragile hands of hers deep into the lake of that dark and adamant surface. She had not looked at me since Jervaise left the room, and when she spoke again she gazed with a kind of concentrated abstraction out of the window at the quiet glory of the calm August evening. Nevertheless her speech showed that all her attention was being given to the human interests that had just been absorbing us. "Are you really a friend of ours?" she asked, "or did you just come here faute de mieux?" The little French phrase came like an unexpected jewel, as if she had relapsed unconsciously into a more familiar language. I was strangely confused by the fact of our being alone together. I had an entirely unwarranted feeling that we were about to make up a quarrel. And I wanted to do my utmost to produce the best possible impression upon her. "I hope I may call myself your brother's friend," I began lamely. "All my sympathies are with him." "You don't know the Jervaises particularly well?" she inquired. For one moment she glanced down at her poised hands, but almost instantly returned to her rather absent-minded gazing through the open window. "Except for Frank and his brother, I never met one of them until last night," I explained. "I was at school and Cambridge with Frank." "But they are your sort, your class," she said. "Don't you agree with them that it's a dreadful thing for Arthur, their chauffeur--and he was in the stables once, years ago--to try to run away with their daughter?" "All my sympathies are with Arthur," I repeated. "Not because the Jervaises were so rude to you?" she asked. "I liked him before that; when we met on the hill, very early this morning," I said. "But, perhaps, he didn't tell you." "Yes, he told me," she said. "And was that the beginning of all the trouble between you and the Jervaises?" "In a way, it was," I agreed. "But it's an involved story and very silly. I admit that they had grounds for suspecting that I had interfered." "Mrs. Jervaise and Olive are always suspecting people," she volunteered. "I've often wondered why?" "Like that, by nature," I suggested.