He saw her again, so quiet, so ready to listen and learn, so modest, and yet with a humour and sense of appreciation that had promised well for the future.A child--an ignorant, charming, uneducated child, that is what she had seemed.He admitted now that his heart, always too soft and too gentle perhaps, had been touched beyond wisdom.She had seemed to need just the protection and advice that he had been fitted to give her.Then, as though in the darkness of the night, the change had been made; from the moment of entering into Skeaton there had been a new Maggie.He could not tell himself, because he was not a man clever at psychology, in what the change consisted.Had he been pressed he would have said perhaps that he had known the old Maggie intimately, that nothing that she could say or do astonished him, but that this new Maggie was altogether a stranger.Time had not altered that; with the passing months he had known her less and less.Why, at their first meeting long ago in Katherine's house he had known her better than he knew her now.He traced the steps of their history in Skeaton; she had eluded him always, never allowing him to hold her for more than a moment, vanishing and appearing again, fantastic, in some strange lighted distance, hurting him and disappointing him...He stopped in his walk, bewildered.He saw, with a sudden flash, that she had never appeared so fascinating to him as when she had been strangest.He saw it now at the moment when she seemed more darkly strange, more sinister and dangerous than ever before.
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