hardly
ever in silence, except when the old man dozed in the easy-chair.

Some rooms, however disguised by their furniture, have a haunted air, an
atmosphere of spiritual joy or tragedy, nobility or holiness, or
spiritual squalor. Ghostly fragments, torn portions of the manifold
self, are lodged there; they drift for ever and ever between the four
walls of the room and penetrate and torment you with its secret.
Prothero, coming into Laura's room, was smitten and pierced with a sense
of mortal pathos, a small and lonely pathos, holding itself aloof,
drifting about him, a poor broken ghost, too proud to approach him or to
cling.

Laura was at home. She was writing, snatching at the few golden moments
of her day, while apart from and unaware of her, sunken in his seat, the
old man dozed by the fireside. From time to time she glanced at him, and
then her face set under its tenderness, as if it fronted, unflinching,
an immovable, perpetual fear.

Prothero, as he crossed her threshold, had taken in the unhappy,
childlike figure, and that other figure, sunken in its seat,
slumbering, inert, the image of decay. He stood still for a moment
before Laura, as a man stands when he is struck with wonder.

He took without speaking the hand, the ridiculously small, thin hand she
gave him, touching it as if he were afraid lest he might hurt the
fragile thing.

He knew what Nina had meant when she said that he need not be afraid of
her, that she couldn't do him any harm.

He saw a mere slender slip of a body, a virginal body, straight-clad;
the body and the face of a white child. Her almost rudimentary features
cast no shade; her lips had kept the soft, low curve of their childhood,
their colourless curl flattened against her still, white face. He saw
all that, and he saw the sleeping tenderness in her eyes; deep-down it
slept, under dark blue veils. Her eyes made him forgive her forehead,
the only thing about her which was not absurdly small.

And of all this he was afraid, afraid for the wonder and mystery it
evoked in him. He saw that Nina watched him and that she was aware of
his fear.

She was dangerously, uncontrollably aware of it, and aware of her own
folly in bringing him to Laura against his judgment and his will. She
might have known that for him there would be a charm, a perfection in
her very immaturity, that she would have for him all the appealing,
pathetic beauty of her type. For him, Nina, watching with a fier