"
"You are quite right," he agreed. "They are unimportant."
Then suddenly the sense of the silence, of their solitude, of
their strange, uncertain relations to one another, swept in upon
them both. For a moment the sense of the great burden she was
carrying fell from Catherine's shoulders. She was back in a
simpler world. Julian was no longer a leader of the people, the
brilliant sociologist, the apostle of her creed. He was the man
who during the last few weeks had monopolised her thoughts to an
amazing extent, the man for whose aid and protection she had
hastened, the man to whom she was perfectly content to entrust the
setting right of this ghastly blunder. Watching him, she suddenly
felt that she was tired of it all, that she would like to creep
away from the storm and rest somewhere. The quiet and his
presence seemed to soothe her. Her tense expression relaxed, her
eyes became softer. She smiled at him gratefully.
"Oh, I cannot tell you," she exclaimed, "how glad I am to be with
you just now! Everything in the outside world seems so terrible.
Do you mind--it is so silly, but after all a woman cannot be as
strong as a man, can she?--would you mind very much just holding
my hand for a moment and staying here quite quietly. I have had a
horrible evening, and when I came in, my head felt as though it
would burst. You do not mind?"
Julian smiled as he leaned towards her. A kind of resentment of
which he had been conscious, even though in some measure ashamed
of it, resentment at her unswerving loyalty to the task she had
set herself, melted away.
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