o be with her. The rush had quickened
when she met his groan with an attenuation.

"We shall at all events--if that's anything--be together."

It was his own good impulse in herself. "It's what I've ventured to
feel. It's much." She replied in effect, silently, that it was whatever
he liked; on which, so far as he had been afraid for anything, he knew
his fear had dropped. The comfort was huge, for it gave back to him
something precious, over which, in the effort of recovery, his own hand
had too imperfectly closed. Kate, he remembered, had said to him, with
her sole and single boldness--and also on grounds he hadn't then
measured--that Mrs. Stringham was a person who _wouldn't_, at a pinch,
in a stretch of confidence, wince. It was but another of the cases in
which Kate was always showing. "You don't think then very horridly of
me?"

And her answer was the more valuable that it came without nervous
effusion--quite as if she understood what he might conceivably have
believed. She turned over in fact what she thought, and that was what
helped him. "Oh you've been extraordinary!"

It made him aware the next moment of how they had been planted there.
She took off her cloak with his aid, though when she had also,
accepting a seat, removed her veil, he recognised in her personal
ravage that the words she had just uttered to him were the one flower
she had to throw. They were all her consolation for him, and the
consolation even still depended on the event. She sat with him at any
rate in the grey clearance, as sad as a winter dawn, made by their
meeting. The image she again evoked for him loomed in it but the
larger. "She has turned her face to the wall."

He saw with the last vividness, and it was as if, in their silences,
they were simply so leaving what he saw. "She doesn't speak at all? I
don't mean not of me."

"Of nothing--of no one." And she went on, Susan Shepherd, giving it out
as she had had to take it. "She doesn't _want_ to die. Think of her
age. Think of her goodness. Think of her beauty. Think of all she is.
Think of all she _has_. She lies there stiffening herself and clinging
to it all. So I thank God--!" the poor lady wound up with a wan
inconsequence.

He wondered. "You thank God--?"

"That she's so quiet."

He continued to wonder. "_Is_ she so quiet?"

"She's more than quiet. She's grim. It's what she has never been. So
you see--all these days. I can't tell you--but it's better so. It would
k