less pay
when Miss Collett did things."

"Yes. But she was wonderful."

(Her lips lifted at the corners. There was a flash of irony in her tone,
this time.)

"Not half so wonderful as you," he said.

"But--Hugh--angel--as long as it's _me_ who pays----"

"That's what I won't have--your paying."

"It's for _my_ peace," she said.

"It certainly isn't for mine," said Brodrick.

She considered him pensively. She knew that he didn't care a rap about
the little squat god, but he abhorred untidiness--in other people.

"Poor darling--how uncomfy he is, with all his little rose-leaves
crumpled under him. Irritating him."

She came and hung over him and stroked his hair till he smiled.

"I told you at the time you ought to have married Gertrude. What on
earth possessed you to go and marry me?"

He kissed her, just to show what possessed him.

The question of finance was settled by his going into it again and
finding out her awful average and making her an allowance large enough
to cover it. And at the end of another two months she came to him in
triumph.

"Look there," she said. "I've saved a halfpenny. It isn't much, but it
shows that I _can_ save when I give my mind to it."

He said he would hang it on his watch-chain and cherish it for ever.

As before, he kissed her. He loved her, as men love a disastrous thing,
desperately, because of her divine folly.

In all these things her genius had no part. It was as if they had agreed
to ignore it. But people were beginning to talk now of the Event of
nineteen-five, the appearance of Hambleby's successor, said to be
greater than Hambleby.

She was conscious then of a misgiving, almost a dread. Still, it hardly
concerned her. This book was the work of some one unfamiliar,
unrecognizable, forgotten by the happy woman that she was. So immense
was the separation between Jane Holland and Jane Brodrick.

She was aware of the imminence of her loss without deploring it. She
spoke of it to Brodrick.

They were sitting together, one night in June, under the lime-tree on
the lawn, only half visible to each other in the falling darkness.

"Would you mind very much," she said, "if I never wrote anything again?"

He turned to her. "What makes you think you can't write? (He too had a
misgiving.) You've plenty of time. You've all day, in fact."

"Yes, all day long."

"It's not as if I bothered you--I say, _they_ don't bother you, do
they?"

She understood him as refe