art and being, to have that unconscious chit cut in
with "only mamma for the girl!" What and whence was this little
malaprop? Her overwrought mind shut away this question--almost in
the asking it--with "Dearer to me, at least, than anything else in
this world, unless----" and then shut away the rest of the answer.

But she was glad to get at Sally, and feel her there, though she
could not speak freely to her--nor, indeed, speak at all. And as soon
as the tension died down, she went back as to a source of peace to the
failure of his powers of memory, obvious, complete. All her hopes lay
in that. Where would they be if the whole past were suddenly sprung on
him? He _might_ be ready to bury bygones, but----

She woke next day fairly at ease in her mind, but feeling as one does
after any near-run escape. And then it was she said to herself that
she was a good actress. But the part _was_ hard to act.

* * * * *

The relations between Fenwick and the Nightingales, mother and
daughter, seem to us to have been acquiring cohesion at the time of
the foregoing interview. It is rather difficult to say why. But it
serves to pave the way to the state of things that Sally accepted as
the "spooneyness" of Fenwick, and her mother's observation of his
"going on," without the dimmest idea of the underlying motives of the
drama. Another three months, bringing us on to these discriminations
of Sally's, may also have brought about appearances that justified
them.

CHAPTER X

THE DANGERS OF AN UNKNOWN PAST. NETTLE-GRASPING, AND A RECURRENCE. WHO
AMONG US COURTS CATECHISM ABOUT HIMSELF? A UNIVERSALLY PROVIDED YOUNG
MAN. HOW ABOUT THE POOR OLD FURNITURE?

We defy the acutest of psychologists to estimate precisely the hold
love has on a man who is diagnosed, in the language of the vulgar
child Sally, as "spooney." Probably no patient has ever succeeded in
doing this himself. It is quite another matter when the eruption has
broken out, when the crater is vomiting flames and the lava is pouring
down on the little homesteads at the mountain's base, that may stand
in the metaphor for all that man's duties and obligations. By that
time he _knows_. But, while still within the "spooney" zone he knows
no more than you or I (or that most important _she_) what the morrow
means to bring. Will it be a step on or a step back? An altogether
new _she_, or the fires of the volcano, let loose beyond recall?

F