He looked tired.

It had not been an easy thing for him to tell Leslie.
And the terror that had sprung into her eyes when the meaning of what he told her came home to her was not a pleasant thing to remember.
Now, when the die was cast, he was beset with doubts of his own wisdom.
Anne looked at him remorsefully; then she slipped down on the rug beside him and laid her glossy red head on his arm.
"Gilbert, I've been rather hateful over this.

I won't be any more.
Please just call me red-headed and forgive me." By which Gilbert understood that, no matter what came of it, there would be no I-told-you-so's.

But he was not wholly comforted.

Duty in the abstract is one thing; duty in the concrete is quite another, especially when the doer is confronted by a woman's stricken eyes.
Some instinct made Anne keep away from Leslie for the next three days.
On the third evening Leslie came down to the little house and told Gilbert that she had made up her mind; she would take Dick to Montreal and have the operation.
She was very pale and seemed to have wrapped herself in her old mantle of aloofness.