The instant prolonged itself.
"Are you praying?" Hilda asked, with much gentleness, almost a
child-like note; and he shook his head. There was another instant's
pause, and she spoke again.
"Are you so grieved, then," she said, "that this has come upon us?"
Again he held his eyes away from her, clasping his hands and looking at
the thing nearest to him, while at last blood from the heart of the
natural man in him came up and stained his face, his forehead under the
thin ruffling of colourless hair, his neck above the white band that was
his badge of difference from other men.
"I--fear--I hardly understand," he said. The words fell cramped and
singly, and his lip twitched. "It--it is impossible to think----"
His eyes went in her direction, but lacked courage to go all the way. He
looked as if he dared not lift his head.
One would not say that Hilda hesitated, for there was no failing in the
wings of her high confidence, but she looked at him in a brave silence.
Her glance had tender investigation in it; she stood on the brink of her
words just long enough to ask whether they would hurt him. Seeing that
they would, she nevertheless plunged, but with infinite compassion and
consideration.
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