She gazed, and frowned. I watched the movement of her face. And I said—as I had said about the soup: ''It''s only water, miss.''
''Only water?''
''Brown water.''
She blinked.
''You are cold,'' I said then. ''Come back, to the house. We''ve been out too long.'' I put her arm about mine. I did it, not thinking; and her arm stayed stiff. But then, the next day—or perhaps, the day
after that—she took my arm again, and was not so stiff; and after that, I suppose we joined arms naturally ... I don''t know. It was only later that I wondered about it and tried to look back. But by then I could only see that there was once a time when we had walked apart; and then a time when we walked together.
She was just a girl, after all; for all that they called her a lady. She was just a girl that had never known fun. One day I was tidying one of her drawers and found a deck of cards in it. She said she thought they must have been her mother''s. She knew the suits, but that was all—she called the jacks, cavaliers!—so I taught her one or two soft Borough games—All-fours, and Put. We played for matches and spills, at first; then we found, in another drawer, a box of little counters, made of mother-of-pearl and shaped like fish and diamonds and crescent moons; and after that, we played for them. The mother-of-pearl was very sweet and cool on the hand.—My hand, I mean; for Maud of course still wore her gloves. And when she put down a card she put it down neatly, making the edges and corners match with the ones below. After a while I began to do that, too.