It was not clear whether she were trying to say something to conceal something, or simply to recover her self-command.

It was a terrible spectacle, and Lawrence Newt felt as if he must veil his eyes, as if he had no right to look upon this great agony of another.
"But--" said he, mechanically, as if by repeating her last word to help her in her struggle.
The sad, severe woman stood before him in the darkening twilight, erect, and more than erect, drawn back from him, and quivering and defiant.

She was silent for an instant; then, leaning forward and reaching toward him, she took the miniature from Lawrence Newt, closed her hand over it convulsively, and gasped in a tone that sounded like a low, wailing cry: "But of _him_." Lawrence Newt raised his eyes from the vehement woman to the portrait that hung above her.
In the twilight that lost loveliness glimmered down into his very heart with appealing pathos.

Perhaps those parted lips in their red bloom had spoken to him--lips so long ago dust! Perhaps those eyes, in the days forever gone--gone with hopes and dreams, and the soft lustre of youth--had looked into his own, had answered his fond yearning with equal fondness.

By all that passionate remembrance, by a lost love, by the early dead, he felt himself conjured to speak, nor suffer his silence even to seem to shield a crime.
"And why not of him ?" he began, calmly, and with profound melancholy rather than anger.