And she had pictured Vane so sad, so depressed! The sight of him thus came upon her as a shock.
At first she was angry and then full of excuses for him.

It was not his fault, she argued, but that of his companions and especially of the squint-eyed, foul-tongued man who no sooner saw that the bottle was getting low than he ordered another one.
What could she do to help him?
Nothing.

He was out of her reach.

She remembered how he looked when she first saw him at the Maiden Head inn.
He would probably look like that again before the night was ended.

She could not bear to gaze upon him as he was now and she crept away with the old wives' words in her mind--Providence looks after drunken men and babes.
She stole from the lobby sad at heart.