'I beg your pardon.

I'm afraid you hurt your foot.' 'Not at all,' Helen assured him.

She had stepped into the light from the windows and, Mr.Kane being beside her, she could see his face clearly and see that he looked very tired.

She had been aware, in these days of somnolent retirement, that one other member of the party seemed, though not in her sense retired from it, to wander rather aimlessly on its outskirts.

That his removal to this ambiguous limbo had been the result of her own arrival Helen had no means of knowing, since she had never seen Mr.Kane in his brief moment of hope when he and Althea had been centre and everybody else outskirts.