At the sight of his smiling, wrinkled face, his gentle blue eyes and the wistful droop of disappointment at the corners of his mouth, her indignation changed suddenly to pity.

It seemed to her that she saw all his eighty years looking at her from that furrowed face out of those little wandering round blue eyes--saw the human part of him as she had never seen it before--with its patience of unfulfilment, its scant small pleasures, its innocent senile passion at the end; saw, too, the divine part, hidden in him as in all humanity--that communion of longing which bound his passionate fluting, Angela's passionate remorse and her own passionate purity into the universal congregation of unsatisfied souls.
The sharp words died upon her lips and, kneeling at his side, she took his shrivelled little hands into her warm, comforting clasp.

"Dear Uncle Percival, I understand, and I love you," she said..