re just that,--not your regimens or your
analyses,--but your words, your glance, the touch of your hand, your
presence. Everybody knows you have a bewildering presence. I need not
add to the idle compliments you must receive on all hands. But surely I
have recognised the greatness beneath the outward glamour. And it has
cast a spell over me. I admit it. I am fettered to it, riveted to it. We
women suffer to-day because we have no such men as you to look up to.
Oh, to have met for once something great, something precious, in a world
where these things are so rare!"

He glanced up at her. He could not help observing her spruce footgear
smothered in the dust of the road, her straight proud back, her fine
profile outlined against the bright colours of the chintz, and her
blue-veined hands. And he felt an uncontrollable impulse to tell her how
deeply he admired her.

"You are no fool," she pursued; "you must have known that I loved you.
Therefore I'm only confirming what you already know. But, believe me,
Lord Henry, I am something more than one of your interesting cases."

He protested.

"Yes, I know; you always say women cannot understand men, because to
comprehend is to comprise, and the smaller cannot comprise the
greater----"

He smiled approvingly.

"You see how accurately I can quote you. That is possibly true. I do not
claim to be able to understand you. But surely you will grant me that a
woman may have a deep and very real knowledge of being in the presence
of something exceptionally great, without precisely understanding it?"

Lord Henry rose. He was blinking rapidly and tugging with more than
usual force at his mesh of hair.

"Am I impossible?" she asked hoarsely. "Is the disparity of our ages
such that, hitherto, the thought of our being more than friends has been
unthinkable to you?"

He went to her side by the window. Words were forming on his lips, but
they would make no sentence. She saw his lips moving and noticed his
distress.

"Is it not a sign of our deep sympathy that you are the only man in all
England in whose presence I forget my ghastly age, my half century and
more expended on futilities?"

He took her hand.

"Oh, Edith Delarayne, you wonderful creature!" he exclaimed; "that is
the tragedy. You put your finger on the tragedy. If only you could be
twenty again, what a wife you would make for me!"

She gave a little sob and fell into his arms. "Oh, my boy, my dear boy!"
she cried, a