nal burst out to me--at the very end of things, when the poor girl was
on her way to that fatal Brindisi and he was trying to persuade himself
and me that he had never really cared for her--I was quite astonished to
observe how literary and how just his expressions were. He talked like
quite a good book--a book not in the least cheaply sentimental. You see,
I suppose he regarded me not so much as a man. I had to be regarded as
a woman or a solicitor. Anyhow, it burst out of him on that horrible
night. And then, next morning, he took me over to the Assizes and I saw
how, in a perfectly calm and business-like way, he set to work to secure
a verdict of not guilty for a poor girl, the daughter of one of his
tenants, who had been accused of murdering her baby. He spent two
hundred pounds on her defence... Well, that was Edward Ashburnham.

I had forgotten about his eyes. They were as blue as the sides of a
certain type of box of matches. When you looked at them carefully
you saw that they were perfectly honest, perfectly straightforward,
perfectly, perfectly stupid. But the brick pink of his complexion,
running perfectly level to the brick pink of his inner eyelids, gave
them a curious, sinister expression--like a mosaic of blue porcelain set
in pink china. And that chap, coming into a room, snapped up the gaze of
every woman in it, as dexterously as a conjurer pockets billiard balls.
It was most amazing. You know the man on the stage who throws up sixteen
balls at once and they all drop into pockets all over his person, on his
shoulders, on his heels, on the inner side of his sleeves; and he stands
perfectly still and does nothing. Well, it was like that. He had rather
a rough, hoarse voice.

And, there he was, standing by the table. I was looking at him, with my
back to the screen. And suddenly, I saw two distinct expressions
flicker across his immobile eyes. How the deuce did they do it, those
unflinching blue eyes with the direct gaze? For the eyes themselves
never moved, gazing over my shoulder towards the screen. And the gaze
was perfectly level and perfectly direct and perfectly unchanging. I
suppose that the lids really must have rounded themselves a little and
perhaps the lips moved a little too, as if he should be saying: "There
you are, my dear." At any rate, the expression was that of pride, of
satisfaction, of the possessor. I saw him once afterwards, for a moment,
gaze upon the sunny fields of Branshaw and say: