aura as she isn't."

She faced him in her courage. He might take it, if he liked, that she
knew Nicky was in love with her as she was not; that she knew Tanqueray
would never, like Nicky, see her as she was not, to be in love with
that.

"Oh, you're too subtle," he said. But he understood her subtlety.

He must tell her about Rose. Before the others could come up with them
he must tell her. And then he must tell Nicky.

"Jane," he said, "will you forgive me for never coming to see you? I
simply couldn't come."

"I know, George, I know."

"You don't. You don't know what I felt like."

"Perhaps not. And yet, I think, you might----"

But what she thought he might have done she would not tell him.

"At any rate," said he, "you'll let me come and see you now? Often; I
want to come often."

He meant to tell her that his marriage was to make no difference.

"Come as often as you want. Come as often as you used to."

"Was it so very often?"

"Not too often."

"I say, those were glorious times we had. We'll have them again, Jinny.
There are things we've got to talk about. Things we've got to do. Why,
we're hardly beginning."

"Do you remember saying, 'When you've made yourself an absolutely clear
medium, then you can begin'?"

"I remember."

He was content now to join her in singing the duet of remembrance.

She dismissed herself. "What have _you_ been doing?"

"Not much. It looks as if I couldn't do things without you."

A look of heavenly happiness came upon her face, and passed.

"That isn't so, George. There never was anybody less dependent on other
people. That's why nothing has ever stopped you. Nothing ever will.
Whereas--you're right about me. Anything might stop me."

"Could _I_ stop you?"

Not for his life could he have told what made him ask her that question,
whether an insane impulse, or a purely intellectual desire to complete
his knowledge of her, to know how deep she had gone in and what his
power was, whether he could, indeed, "stop" her.

"You?" she said, and her voice had a long, profound and passionate
vibration. He had not dreamed that such a tone could have been wrung
from Jane.

Her eyes met his. Steady they were and deep, under their level brows;
but in them, too, was that sudden, unexpected quality. Something in her
startled him with its intensity.

Her voice, her look, had made it impossible for him to tell her about
Rose. It was not the moment.

"I didn't know she wa