"I can't talk about it, Molly.

God knows what I feel." This was the way he helped to support that little fiction of the man of deep and strong emotions, frost-bound in an implacable reserve.
He took up the book again, and she fell asleep at the sound of the reading.

He sat and watched her.
Straight and still in her white draperies, she lay like a dead woman.
Some trick of the shaded lamplight, falling on her face, exaggerated its pallor and discoloration.

He was fascinated by the very horror of it; as he stared at her face it seemed to expand, to grow vague and insubstantial, till his strained gaze relaxed and shifted, making it start into relief again.

He watched it swimming in and out of a liquid dusk of vision, till the sight of it became almost a malady of the nerves.