So quiet was Maggie, so little in any one's way that, at the end of a fortnight, she made no difference to any one in the house.She was much better now, looking a different person, colour in her cheeks and light in her eyes.During her illness they had cut her hair and this made her look more than ever like a boy.She wore her plain dark dresses, black and dark blue; they never quite fitted and, with her queer odd face, her high forehead, rather awkward mouth, and grave questioning eyes she gave you the impression that she had been hurried into some disguise and was wearing it with discomfort but amusement.Some one who met her at the Trenchards at this time said of her: "What a funny girl! She's like a schoolboy dressed up to play a part in the school speeches." Of course she was not playing a part, no one could have been more entirely natural and honest, but she was odd, strange, out of her own world, and every one felt it.
It was, perhaps, this strangeness that attracted Paul Trenchard.He was, above everything, a kindly man-kindly, perhaps a little through laziness, but nevertheless moved always by distress or misfortune in others.Maggie was not distressed--she was quite cheerful and entirely unsentimental--nevertheless she had been very ill, was almost penniless, had had some private trouble, was au orphan, had no friends save two old aunts, and was amazingly ignorant of the world.
This last was, perhaps, the thing that struck him most of all.He, too, was ignorant of the world, but he didn't know that, and he was amazed at the things that Maggie brushed aside as unimportant.He found that he was beginning to think of her as "my little heathen."His attitude was the same as that of a good missionary discovering a naked but trusting native.
The thought of training this virgin mind was delightful to him.
He liked her quaintness, and one day suddenly, to his own surprise, when they were alone in the drawing-room, he kissed her, a most chaste kiss, gently on the forehead.