Where had he seen that look before?
Yes, he remembered.

It was when he was twenty-one and had been sent away to Algiers because he was falling in love with a farmer's daughter.

As he drove down a lane with his father towards the railway station, those long years ago, he had seen the girl's face looking at him from the window of a labourer's cottage at the crossroads; and its stupefied desolation haunted him for many years, even after the girl had married and gone to live in Scotland--that place of torment for an Irish soul.
The look in Kitty Tynan's face reminded him of that farmer's lass in his boyhood's history.

He was to blame then--was he to blame now?
Certainly not consciously, not by any intended word or act.

Now he met her eyes and smiled at her, not gaily, not gravely, but with a kind of whimsical helplessness; for she was the first to remind him that he was leaving the court-room in a different position (if not a different man) from that in which he entered it.