aching Nina, the woman with unquiet eyes and nervous gestures, and
a walk that suggested the sweep of a winged thing to its end. A glance
at Nina told him that wherever she was she could look after herself.

Morose, fearlessly disarrayed, and with it all a trifle haggard and
forlorn, Nina Lempriere had the air of not belonging to them. She
paused, she loitered, she swept tempestuously ahead, but none of her
movements had the slightest reference to her companions. From time to
time he glanced uncomfortably at Nina.

"Leave her," said Laura, "to herself."

"Do you think," he said, "she minds being left?"

"Not she. She likes it. You don't suppose she's thinking of _us_?"

"Dear me, no; but one likes to be polite."

"She'd so much rather you were sincere."

"I say, mayn't I be both?"

"Oh yes, but you couldn't always be with Nina. She makes you feel
sometimes as if it was no use your existing."

"Do you think," he said, "she'll stand beside Jane Holland?"

"No. She may go farther."

"Go farther? How?"

"She's got a better chance."

"A better chance? I shouldn't have backed her chance against Miss
Holland's."

"It _is_ better. She doesn't get so mixed up with people. If she _were_
to----"

He waited.

"She'd go with a rush, in one piece, and either die or come out of it
all right. Whereas Jane----"

He waited breathlessly.

"Jane would be torn to tatters, inch by inch."

Nicholson felt a curious constriction across his chest. His throat dried
as he spoke again.

"What do you think would tear her most?"

"Oh, if she married."

"I thought you meant that."

"The thing is," said Laura, "not to marry." She said it meditatively and
without reference to herself; but he gathered that, if reference had
been made, she would, with still more dogged a determination, have kept
her view.

He agreed with her, and pondered. Tanqueray had once said the very same
thing to him, in talking about Jane. She ought not to marry. He,
Tanqueray, wasn't going to, not if he knew it. That was the view they
all took. Not to marry.

He knew that they were under vows of poverty. Were they pledged to
chastity and obedience, too? Obedience, immitigable, unrelenting? How
wonderful they were, they and their achievements and renunciations, the
things they did, and the things they let alone simply and as a matter of
course, with their infallible instinct for the perfect. High, solitary
priest and priestesses of a god diviner t