But Phœbe was always thinking now. He had given her cause to think.
He began to hate the little brown curl that hung over her left ear, though it was anguish to him to hate anything that was Phœbe's. He looked out with nervous anxiety for the movement of her little white hand. He said to himself, "If she does it again, I can't come near her any more."
Yet he kept on coming; and was happy with her until Phœbe (poor, predestined little Phœbe) did it again. Gibson shuddered with the horror of the thing. He kept on saying to himself, "She's sweet, she's good, she's adorable. It isn't her fault. But I can't—I can't sit in the room with it."
And the next minute Phœbe would be so adorable that he would repent miserably of his brutality.
Then, one hot, still evening, he was alone with her in the little sitting-room. Outside, on the grass plot, her father sat in his bath-chair while Effie read aloud [Pg 75] to him (out of her turn). Her voice made a cover for Gibson's voice and Phœbe's.
Phœbe was dressed (for the heat) in a white gown with wide, open sleeves. Her low collar showed the pure, soft swell of her neck to the shoulder-line.
She was sitting upright and demure in a straight-backed chair, with her hands folded quietly in her lap.
"That isn't a very comfortable chair you've got," he said.
He knew that she was tired with pushing the bath-chair about all day.
"It's the one I always sit in," said Phœbe.
"Well, you're not going to sit in it now," he said.
He drew the armchair out of its sacred corner and made her sit in that. He put a cushion at her head and a footstool at her feet.
"You make my heart ache," he said.
"Do I?"
He could n
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