With her he had bridged a gulf it would have taken weeks to span, but the trust in Joan's eyes still hurt.

If only he could have begun upon a rock, Brian's rock of fact and not the shifting sands of his own errant fancy! It would have been a glory to live up to the faith in the girl's wistful eyes.
He was sorry he had climbed the stairway, sorry he had solved the mystery of the brocade gown, sorry he had lied, sorry, frenziedly sorry that whatever new thing slipped into his life, no matter how simple and beautiful it seemed, took on the familiar complexity fatal to his peace of mind.
But he was passionately grateful for the tense moment when Joan had seemed to turn to him for sympathy, a wild and lonely dryad of a girl in a mended gown..