He now saw the woman whose portrait had so fascinated him in the library.

As his eyes fastened on her here, he almost fancied he could see the boy's--his father's-face looking over her shoulder.
He instantly went to her, and said: "I am sorry to be late." His first impulse had been to offer his hand, as, naturally, he would have done in "barbaric" lands, but the instinct of this other civilisation was at work in him.

He might have been a polite casual guest, and not a grandson, bringing the remembrance, the culmination of twenty-seven years' tragedy into a home; she might have been a hostess with whom he wished to be on terms: that was all.
If the situation was trying for him, it was painful for her.

She had had only a whispered announcement before Sir William led the way to dinner.
Yet she was now all her husband had been, and more.

Repression had been her practice for unnumbered years, and the only heralds of her feelings were the restless wells of her dark eyes: the physical and mental misery she had endured lay hid under the pale composure of her face.