could oblige her by accepting it. She not only permitted, she
fairly invited him to open his eyes. "I'm so glad you're here." It was
no answer to his question, but it had for the moment to serve. And the
rest was fully to come.

He smiled at her and presently found himself, as a kind of consequence
of communion with her, talking her own language. "It's a very wonderful
experience."

"Well"--and her raised face shone up at him--"that's all I want you to
feel about it. If I weren't afraid," she added, "there are things I
should like to say to you."

"And what are you afraid of, please?" he encouragingly asked.

"Of other things that I may possibly spoil. Besides, I don't, you know,
seem to have the chance. You're always, you know, _with_ her."

He was strangely supported, it struck him, in his fixed smile; which
was the more fixed as he felt in these last words an exact description
of his course. It was an odd thing to have come to, but he was always
with her. "Ah," he none the less smiled, "I'm not with her now."

"No--and I'm so glad, since I get this from it. She's ever so much
better."

"Better? Then she _has_ been worse?"

Mrs. Stringham waited. "She has been marvellous--that's what she has
been. She _is_ marvellous. But she's really better."

"Oh then if she's really better--!" But he checked himself, wanting
only to be easy about it and above all not to appear engaged to the
point of mystification. "We shall miss her the more at dinner."

Susan Shepherd, however, was all there for him. "She's keeping herself.
You'll see. You'll not really need to miss anything. There's to be a
little party."

"Ah I do see--by this aggravated grandeur."

"Well, it _is_ lovely, isn't it? I want the whole thing. She's lodged
for the first time as she ought, from her type, to be; and doing it--I
mean bringing out all the glory of the place--makes her really happy.
It's a Veronese picture, as near as can be--with me as the inevitable
dwarf, the small blackamoor, put into a corner of the foreground for
effect. If I only had a hawk or a hound or something of that sort I
should do the scene more honour. The old housekeeper, the woman in
charge here, has a big red cockatoo that I might borrow and perch on my
thumb for the evening." These explanations and sundry others Mrs.
Stringham gave, though not all with the result of making him feel that
the picture closed him in. What part was there for _him_, with his
attitude that lac