our work--it is the beginning of all real success. But
you want positive knowledge--the knowledge you could get from books, and
the knowledge other people could teach you. You want a true sense of what
has been done and what can be done with your art, and you want an insight
into the world of ideas lying round it and about it. You are very young,
and you have had to train yourself. But every human art nowadays is so
complicated that none of us can get on without using the great stores of
experience others have laid up for us.'

It was all out now. He had spoken his inmost mind. They had stopped
again, and she was looking at him intently; it struck him that he could
not possibly have said what he had been saying unless he had been led on
by an instinctive dependence upon a great magnanimity of nature in her.
And then the next moment the strange opposites the matter held in it
flashed across him. He saw the crowded theatre, the white figure on the
stage, his ear seemed to be full of the clamour of praise with which
London had been overwhelming its favourite. It was to this spoilt child
of fortune that he had been playing the schoolmaster--he, one captious
man of letters, against the world.

But she had not a thought of the kind, or rather, the situation presented
itself to her in exactly the contrary light. To her Kendal's words,
instead of being those of a single critic, were the voice and the
embodiment of a hundred converging impressions and sensations, and she
felt a relief in having analysed to the full the vague trouble which had
been settling upon her by this unraveling of her own feelings and his.

'I am very grateful to you,' she said steadily; 'very. It is strange, but
almost when I first saw you I felt that there was something ominous in
you to me. My dream, in which I have been living, has never been so
perfect since, and now I think it has gone. Don't look so grieved,' she
cried, inexpressibly touched by his face, 'I am glad you told me all you
thought. It will be a help to me. And as for poor Elvira,' she added,
trying to smile for all her extreme paleness, 'tell Mr. Wallace I give
her up. I am not vexed, I am not angry. Don't you think now we had better
go back to Mrs. Stuart? I should like a rest with her before we all meet
again.'

She moved forward as she spoke, and it seemed to Kendal that her step was
unsteady and that she was deadly white. He planted himself before her in
the descending path, and h