He caught hold of both her hands and pressed them quite hard against his bowed face.

He did not kiss them but held them against his cheek.
"It is terrible," he said.
Without being told she knew what he meant.
"You have been hearing new horrible things ?" she said.

What she guessed was that they were the kind of things she had shuddered at, feeling her blood at once hot and cold.

He lifted his face but did not release her hands.
"At my friend's house.

A man had just come over from Holland," he shook himself as if to dismiss a nightmare.