Claude looked at her again, and thought how intelligent her eyes were. As he looked at them they seemed to grow more intelligent--as if in answer to his gaze. "Right things," she added, with an emphasis on the penultimate word. "But--forgive me--how can you know?" "I do know. I'm an ignoramus with marvellous instincts in certain directions. That's why a lot of people--silly people, you think, I daresay--follow my lead." "Well, but--" "Go on!" "I think I'd better not." "You can say anything to me. I'm never in a hurry to take offense." "I was going to say that you seemed rather to wish once to draw me out of my shell into a very different kind of life," said Claude slowly, hesitatingly, and slightly reddening. "I acted quite against my artistic instinct when I did that." "Why?" Mrs. Shiffney looked at him in silence for a moment. She was wishing to blush. But that was an effort beyond her powers. Very far away behind them a clarion sounded. "The soldiers must be going back to barracks, I suppose," she said. Claude was feeling treacherous, absurdly. The thought of Charmian had come to him, and with it the disagreeable, almost hateful sensation. "Yes, I suppose they are," he said coldly. He did not mean to speak coldly; but directly he had said the words he knew that his voice had become frigid. "What a stupid ass I am!" was his comment on himself. But how to be different? Mrs. Shiffney was looking very grave. Her drawn-down brows, her powerful lips suggested to him at this moment suffering. In London he had thought of her as a typical pleasure-seeking woman, greedy of sensation, reckless in the chase after it. And he had disliked, almost feared her, despite her careless charm. Now he felt differently about her. He had come to that point in a man's acquaintance with a woman when he says to himself, "I never understood her properly." He seemed to himself a brute. Yet what had he done? She did not speak for several minutes. He wanted to speak, to break a silence which, to him, was painful; but he could think of nothing to say. He felt oddly moved, yet he could not have said why, perhaps even to himself. Keeping his hands clasped round his knees, he looked out beyond the gorge over the open country. Far down, at the foot of the cascades, he saw in a hollow, the clustering trees about the baths of Sidi Imcin. Along the reddish bareness of the hill showed the white blossoms of some fruit-trees, almost like a white dust flung up against the tawny breast of the earth. The water made a hoarse noise in the hidden depths of the gorge, lifted its voice into a roar as it leaped down into the valley, murmured like the voice of a happy dreamer where it slipped by among the trees. And Claude, as he sat in silence, believed that he heard clearly the threefold utterance, subtly combined, and, like some strange trinity, striving to tell him truths of life.