Very soon tea was brought in.

The homely service of the meal, and Robert's plain clothes, seemed to demand some sort of explanation.

It was she who provided the opening.
"Will your wife be long away ?" she enquired.
Tallente looked at his guest thoughtfully.

She was pouring out tea from an ordinary brown earthenware pot with an air of complete absorption in her task.

The friendliness of her seemed somehow to warm the atmosphere of the room, even as her sympathy had stolen into the frozen places of his life.