o proud or so broken as to be reached by
nothing but that. This is a voice so gentle, so human, so feminine--a
faint, far-away voice with the little quaver of a heart-break. You've
listened to it unawares; for the arrangement and effect of
everything--when I compare them with what we found the first day we came
down--shows, even if mechanically and disdainfully exercised, your
admirable, infallible hand. It's your extraordinary genius; you make
things 'compose' in spite of yourself. You've only to be a day or two in
a place with four sticks for something to come of it!"

"Then if anything has come of it here, it has come precisely of just
four. That's literally, by the inventory, all there are!" said Mrs.
Gereth.

"If there were more there would be too many to convey the impression in
which half the beauty resides--the impression, somehow, of something
dreamed and missed, something reduced, relinquished, resigned: the
poetry, as it were, of something sensibly _gone_." Fleda ingeniously and
triumphantly worked it out. "Ah, there's something here that will never
be in the inventory!"

"Does it happen to be in your power to give it a name?" Mrs. Gereth's
face showed the dim dawn of an amusement at finding herself seated at
the feet of her pupil.

"I can give it a dozen. It's a kind of fourth dimension. It's a
presence, a perfume, a touch. It's a soul, a story, a life. There's ever
so much more here than you and I. We're in fact just three!"

"Oh, if you count the ghosts!"

"Of course I count the ghosts. It seems to me ghosts count double--for
what they were and for what they are. Somehow there were no ghosts at
Poynton," Fleda went on. "That was the only fault."

Mrs. Gereth, considering, appeared to fall in with the girl's fine
humor. "Poynton was too splendidly happy."

"Poynton was too splendidly happy," Fleda promptly echoed.

"But it's cured of that now," her companion added.

"Yes, henceforth there'll be a ghost or two."

Mrs. Gereth thought again: she found her young friend suggestive. "Only
_she_ won't see them."

"No, 'she' won't see them." Then Fleda said, "What I mean is, for this
dear one of ours, that if she had (as I _know_ she did; it's in the very
taste of the air!) a great accepted pain--"

She had paused an instant, and Mrs. Gereth took her up. "Well, if she
had?"

Fleda still hesitated. "Why, it was worse than yours."

Mrs. Gereth reflected. "Very likely." Then she too hesitated. "The