threw his arm across his face. It gave him the air of fighting off some invisible enemy. It seemed to her a characteristic attitude. He was so often fighting invisible enemies. And that gave to his eyes the light that she had sometimes seen flash across them, the light of one who has come victorious out of a battle. And she knew that was why his face was so different in expression from that of her father. Her father did not fight.
She grew sentimental about him as she sat there, saw him again as the boy left behind in hotels, lonely and forlorn, trying to puzzle out the strange things that he saw about him, pictured his erratic and undisciplined youth, his sensitiveness and fastidiousness at war with the coarseness and ruthlessness in the world about him, thought over the probability that his early sex experience had been soiled by the selfishness of women older than himself, as she knew his wife had been. Tears came to her eyes as she remembered how life had hurt him. She wanted to get out of her cot then and there and put her arms round him and swear that that was the one thing she would never do. She did not in that moment perceive that it was the one thing she would inevitably do because they loved each other.
IV
David Bruce’s face lit up when they walked into his office to be married the next morning. Every Justice of the Peace in the North could tell a tale of at least one strange pair who had descended upon him pleading for secrecy. Sometimes he knew the parties, but usually he did not, for they came from other places. But Bruce knew well who were his merry suppliants for silence. He had not told Dane, and he did not dream of telling either
