r. "Is _that_ peace?"

"Of having _been_ loved," she went on. "That is. Of having," she wound
up, "realised her passion. She wanted nothing more. She has had _all_
she wanted."

Lucid and always grave, she gave this out with a beautiful authority
that he could for the time meet with no words. He could only again look
at her, though with the sense in so doing that he made her more than he
intended take his silence for assent. Quite indeed as if she did so
take it she quitted the table and came to the fire. "You may think it
hideous that I should now, that I should _yet_"--she made a point of
the word--"pretend to draw conclusions. But we've not failed."

"Oh!" he only again murmured.

She was once more close to him, close as she had been the day she came
to him in Venice, the quickly returning memory of which intensified and
enriched the fact. He could practically deny in such conditions nothing
that she said, and what she said was, with it, visibly, a fruit of that
knowledge. "We've succeeded." She spoke with her eyes deep in his own.
"She won't have loved you for nothing." It made him wince, but she
insisted. "And you won't have loved _me_."

II

He was to remain for several days under the deep impression of this
inclusive passage, so luckily prolonged from moment to moment, but
interrupted at its climax, as may be said, by the entrance of Aunt
Maud, who found them standing together near the fire. The bearings of
the colloquy, however, sharp as they were, were less sharp to his
intelligence, strangely enough, than those of a talk with Mrs. Lowder
alone for which she soon gave him--or for which perhaps rather Kate
gave him--full occasion. What had happened on her at last joining them
was to conduce, he could immediately see, to her desiring to have him
to herself. Kate and he, no doubt, at the opening of the door, had
fallen apart with a certain suddenness, so that she had turned her hard
fine eyes from one to the other; but the effect of this lost itself, to
his mind, the next minute, in the effect of his companion's rare
alertness. She instantly spoke to her aunt of what had first been
uppermost for herself, inviting her thereby intimately to join them,
and doing it the more happily also, no doubt, because the fact she
resentfully named gave her ample support. "Had you quite understood, my
dear, that it's full three weeks--?" And she effaced herself as if to
leave Mrs. Lowder to deal from her own point of vie