He asked no questions, and offered no explanations.

The sense of embarrassment, on his side, had produced unaccountable changes.

He showed the needful attention to Carmina, with a silent gentleness which presented him in a new character.

His customary manner with ailing persons, women as well as men, was rather abrupt: his quick perception hurried him into taking the words out of their mouths (too pleasantly to give offence) when they were describing their symptoms.

There he sat now, contemplating his pale little cousin, with a patient attention wonderful to see; listening to the commonplace words which dropped at intervals from her lips, as if--in his state of health, and with the doubtful prospect which it implied--there were no serious interests to occupy his mind.
Mrs.Gallilee could endure it no longer.
If she had not deliberately starved her imagination, and emptied her heart of any tenderness of feeling which it might once have possessed, her son's odd behaviour would have interested instead of perplexing her.
As it was, her scientific education left her as completely in the dark, where questions of sentiment were concerned, as if her experience of humanity, in its relation to love, had been experience in the cannibal islands.