She sat by the window and waited in the strange, throbbing darkness of hot eyes closed in daylight, a darkness smitten by the sun and shot with a fiery fume.
They were coming now. She heard feet on the gravel outside, round the corner; she heard Robert's voice and Janey's; and then little shuffling footsteps at the door, and two voices shrill and sweet.
Robert came in first and the children with him. They stood all three on the threshold, looking at her. Robert was smiling, but the little girls (they were very little) were grave. His eyes drew her and she came toward them as she was used to come to the things of her desire, swift and shy, with a trailing, troubling movement; the way that he had seen her come, swayed by the rhythm of impulse.
The children stood stock still as she stooped to them. Her fear of them made her supremely gentle. Little Barbara put up her round rose face with its soft mouth thrust forward in a premature kiss. Janet gave her a tiny hand and gazed at her with brooding, irresponsive eyes. Her little mouth never moved as Kitty's mouth touched it.
But little Barbara held out her spade and bucket for Kitty to see. "Look, look," said little Barbara, "Daddy gave them me to build castles in the sand." Barbara spoke so fast that she panted, and laughed in a divine superfluity of joy.
Robert stood looking down from his tremendous height at Barbara, tenderly as one who contemplates a thing at once heartrending and absurd. Then his eyes turned to Kitty, smiling quietly as if they said, "Didn't I tell you to wait until you'd seen them?" Kitty's heart contracted with a sharp, abominable pang.
Then Janey took the little girls to the room upstairs where their nurse was. Barbara looked back at Kitty as she went, but Kitty's eyes followed Janet.
"Robert," she said, "will she always look at me like that? Shall I never know what she is thinking?"
"I told you we had to be very careful of her."
"No. Physically, she's far stronger than Barbara. She's what you call morally delicate."
"Well--not able to bear things. For instance, we'd a small child staying with us once. It turned out that she wasn't a nice child at all. We didn't know it, though. But Janet had a perfect horror of her. It's as if she had a sort of intuition. She was so unhappy about it that we had to send the child away."