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There was something half-laughable, half-pathetic, in his air of strained interest. Only when the Mistress and the Master both chanced to leave the car at the same time, at market or bank or postoffice, would Lad cease from this genial and absorbed inspection of everything in sight. Left alone in the machine, he always realized at once that he was on guard.
"I wish I had known!" exclaimed Gilbert, happy but half perplexed. "You ought to have known," answered the girl. Her eyebrows were raised a little with the half-pathetic look he loved, while her mouth smiled. "I shall never understand," he said, but he began to laugh too. "I will tell you. In the first place, I shall never be angry with you again never! Do you believe me, Gilbert?"
With a half-pathetic, happy smile he listened to the old familiar melody, which spoke to his heart like a voice from his own lost youth. But he was not the only attentive listener.
Taine, with practised skill, had prepared the way for her protege, by subtly stimulating the curiosity of her guests the appearance of the two men, alone, would have attracted their attention The artist, with his strong, splendidly proportioned, athletic body, and his handsome, clean-cut intellectual face calmly sure of himself with the air of one who knows that his veins are rich with the wealth of many generations of true culture and refinement; and the novelist easily the most famous of his day tall, emaciated, grotesquely stooped with his homely face seamed and lined, world-worn and old, and his sharp eyes peering from under his craggy brows with that analyzing, cynical, half-pathetic half-humorous expression certainly presented a contrast too striking to escape notice.
They returned, some hours later, and were busied all the afternoon with the placing and decorations of an exquisite "butsu-dan," or Buddhist shelf, on which the ihai of the dead are placed. Kano, visiting it, unperceived, next day, noted with the same curious, half-quizzical, half-pathetic look that no Buddhist kaimyo or after-name had been given to his daughter.
No more he did; but there was a strange tenderness in his tones when he spoke to her; a half-pathetic way of seeking after her, if by any chance she was absent for a minute from the places where he expected to find her; a consideration for her, about this time, in his way of bringing back trifling presents, or small pieces of news that he thought might interest her, which sank deep into her heart.
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