e shook her head dismally.

"Now comes the advice. Shall I tell you the truth? You've been worrying
your brain over that wretched animal till your nerves are all upset.
You're ill practically, or you couldn't take this morbid view of it. You
ought to leave town and go away for a change."

"Where could I go to?"

"The south coast for choice. It's bracing."

"If I only could! No, I can't leave London."

"Why not? There's an excellent service of trains----"

"Because--because I love London."

"So do I for many reasons. There's no place like it, to my mind. But if
I'd overworked myself in it, I should tear myself away. You can have too
much of a good thing."

"No, not of the only place on earth you care to be in."

"Well, I've given my valuable advice. You're not going to take it--I
never thought you would. Personally I hate the people who give me
advice. What I should like to give you would be help. But the question
is, Am I able to give it? Have I even the right to offer it?"

She looked up at him. Some lyric voice, whether of hope or joy, or both,
had called the soul for an instant to her face--a poor little fluttering
soul, that gazed out through her grey eyes at Wyndham--for an instant
only, and was seen no more. When he spoke, he spoke not to it, but to
the woman he had known.

"You don't answer." (She had answered, and he knew it.) "It all comes
back to what I said long ago. The most elementary knowledge of life
would have saved you all this: if you'd had it, you could not have let
these fatuities worry you to this extent. Do you remember my telling you
that you ought to love life for its own sake?"

The moment he had said the words, he would have given anything to recall
them, but it was too late; she remembered only too well. However she had
disguised the truth, Wyndham's passionate defence of realism was not
altogether an appeal to her intellect. He ought not to have reminded her
of that now.

"Yes," she answered; "how could I forget?"

"I said at the time that you must know life in order to love it, and I
say so now. But, Audrey"--she started and flushed--"if I were another
man I should not say that."

"What would you say?"

"That you must love in order to know."

"Is there any need to tell me that _now_?"

"Perhaps not. It's what I would have told you then--if I had been
another man."

Her lip quivered slightly, and she held one hand with the other to give
herself the feeling of a human