She was a woman, and, dark as it was, she kept the disfigured cheek turned from him.
He would have replied, but she made a sign to him to eat, and, seating herself on a stool in the corner with her plate on her lap, she set him an example.

Apart from her weary attitude, and the droop of her head, he might have deemed the scene in which they had taken part a figment of his brain.

But round them was the gloom of the closed room! "You did not see me ?" he repeated presently.
She stood up.

"I would I had never seen you!" she cried; and her anguished tone bore witness to the truth of her words.

"It is the worst, it is the bitterest thing of all! of all!" she repeated.