was the question that made her occasionally stop. Several times she
uttered it, asked how this and that difficulty had been met. Mrs. Gereth
replied with pale lucidity--was naturally the person most familiar with
the truth that what she undertook was always somehow achieved. To do it
was to do it--she had more than one kind of magnificence. She confessed
there, audaciously enough, to a sort of arrogance of energy, and Fleda,
going on again, her inquiry more than answered and her arm rendering
service, flushed, in her diminished identity, with the sense that such a
woman was great.

"You do mean literally everything, to the last little miniature on the
last little screen?"

"I mean literally everything. Go over them with the catalogue!"

Fleda went over them while they walked again; she had no need of the
catalogue. At last she spoke once more: "Even the Maltese cross?"

"Even the Maltese cross. Why not that as well as everything
else?--especially as I remembered how you like it."

Finally, after an interval, the girl exclaimed: "But the mere fatigue of
it, the exhaustion of such a feat! I drag you to and fro here while you
must be ready to drop."

"I'm very, very tired." Mrs. Gereth's slow head-shake was tragic. "I
couldn't do it again."

"I doubt if they'd bear it again!"

"That's another matter: they'd bear it if I could. There won't have
been, this time either, a shake or a scratch. But I'm too tired--I very
nearly don't care."

"You must sit down, then, till I go," said Fleda. "We must find a
bench."

"No. I'm tired of _them_: I'm not tired of you. This is the way for you
to feel most how much I rest on you." Fleda had a compunction, wondering
as they continued to stroll whether it was right after all to leave her.
She believed, however, that if the flame might for the moment burn low,
it was far from dying out; an impression presently confirmed by the way
Mrs. Gereth went on: "But one's fatigue is nothing. The idea under which
one worked kept one up. For you I _could_--I can still. Nothing will
have mattered if _she's_ not there."

There was a question that this imposed, but Fleda at first found no
voice to utter it: it was the thing that, between them, since her
arrival, had been so consciously and vividly unsaid. Finally she was
able to breathe: "And if she _is_ there--if she's there already?"

Mrs. Gereth's rejoinder too hung back; then when it came--from sad eyes
as well as from lips barely move