"It has made you ill, poor girl.

Stay in Italy a long time, now you are once here.

For you to be here at all seems a miracle; it gives me hopes." Miriam did not resent this, in word at all events.

She was submitting again to physical oppression; her head drooped, and her abstracted gaze was veiled with despondent lassitude.

Reuben talked idly, in loose sentences.
"Do you think of me as old or young, Miriam ?" he asked, when both had kept silence for a while.
"I no longer think of you as older than myself." "That is natural.