"I've found that out," she said with her Keswick candor.
He leaned closer to see her face. She did not move.
"Everything seemed clouded and hopeless before you came," he heard her saying.
"Oh, you're still thinking of the pictures," he said, with a note of disappointment.
She laughed, almost inaudibly.
"I wish we didn't have to think about them," she told him.
He found something oddly inflammatory in that acknowledgment. "Then let's not think about them," he suggested. "Why should we, on a night like this!"
She did not answer him. But out of the prolonged silence that fell between them a tree toad shrilled sharply somewhere over their heads. He turned and stared across the garden at the distant house front. It seemed less sinister, bathed as it was in its etherealized wash of light. But it depressed him.
"I shouldn't have asked you to do this," he said, with remorse in his voice.
