The features of Richard Alger instead of his own seemed to look back at him from his own thoughts.

He dashed his hand across his face with an impatient, bewildered motion, as if he brushed away unseen cobwebs, and stood up.

"You have made--" he began again; but Sylvia interrupted him with a weak cry.

"Set down here, set down here, jest a minute, if you don't want to kill me!" she wailed out, and she clutched at his sleeve and pulled him down, and before he knew what she was doing had shrunk close to him, and laid her head on his shoulder.

She went on talking desperately in her weak voice--strained shrill octaves above her ordinary tone.
"I've had this--sofa ten years," she said--"ten years, Richard--an' you never set with me on it before, an'-- you'd been comin'-- here a long while before that came betwixt us last spring, Richard.