hing.
Your liberty is therefore in every way complete."

It had come to the point really that they showed each other pale faces,
and that all the unspoken between them looked out of their eyes in a
dim terror of their further conflict. Something even rose between them
in one of their short silences--something that was like an appeal from
each to the other not to be too true. Their necessity was somehow
before them, but which of them must meet it first? "Thank you!" Kate
said for his word about her freedom, but taking for the minute no
further action on it. It was blest at least that all ironies failed
them, and during another slow moment their very sense of it cleared the
air.

There was an effect of this in the way he soon went on. "You must
intensely feel that it's the thing for which we worked together."

She took up the remark, however, no more than if it were commonplace;
she was already again occupied with a point of her own. "Is it
absolutely true--for if it is, you know, it's tremendously
interesting--that you haven't so much as a curiosity about what she has
done for you?"

"Would you like," he asked, "my formal oath on it?"

"No--but I don't understand. It seems to me in your place--!"

"Ah," he couldn't help breaking in, "what do you know of my place?
Pardon me," he at once added; "my preference is the one I express."

She had in an instant nevertheless a curious thought. "But won't the
facts be published?"

"'Published'?"--he winced.

"I mean won't you see them in the papers?"

"Ah never! I shall know how to escape that."

It seemed to settle the subject, but she had the next minute another
insistence. "Your desire is to escape everything?"

"Everything."

"And do you need no more definite sense of what it is you ask me to
help you to renounce?"

"My sense is sufficient without being definite. I'm willing to believe
that the amount of money's not small."

"Ah there you are!" she exclaimed.

"If she was to leave me a remembrance," he quietly pursued, "it would
inevitably not be meagre."

Kate waited as for how to say it. "It's worthy of her. It's what she
was herself--if you remember what we once said _that_ was."

He hesitated--as if there had been many things. But he remembered one
of them. "Stupendous?"

"Stupendous." A faint smile for it--ever so small--had flickered in her
face, but had vanished before the omen of tears, a little less
uncertain, had shown themselves in his own.