the simple verb 'sto--stare-to
stand fast.'

And to her Courtier was a reality, the chief reality of life, the focus
of her aspiration, the morning and the evening star.

The request, then five days after his farewell visit to Mrs. Noel--for
the elephant-hide trunk which accompanied his rovings, produced her
habitual period of seclusion, followed by her habitual appearance in his
sitting-room bearing a note, and some bags of dried rose--leaves on a
tray. She found him in his shirt sleeves, packing.

"Well, Mrs. Benton; off again!"

Mrs. Benton, plaiting her hands, for she had not yet lost something of
the look and manner of a little girl, answered in her flat, but serene
voice:

"Yes, sir; and I hope you're not going anywhere very dangerous this
time. I always think you go to such dangerous places."

"To Persia, Mrs. Benton, where the carpets come from."

"Oh! yes, sir. Your washing's just come home."

Her, apparently cast-down, eyes stored up a wealth of little details;
the way his hair grew, the set of his back, the colour of his braces.
But suddenly she said in a surprising voice:

"You haven't a photograph you could spare, sir, to leave behind? Mr.
Benton was only saying to me yesterday, we've nothing to remember him
by, in case he shouldn't come back."

"Here's an old one."

Mrs. Benton took the photograph.

"Oh!" she said; "you can see who it is." And holding it perhaps too
tightly, for her fingers trembled, she added:

"A note, please, sir; and the messenger boy is waiting for--an answer."

While he read the note she noticed with concern how packing had brought
the blood into his head....

When, in response to that note, Courtier entered the well-known
confectioner's called Gustard's, it was still not quite tea-time, and
there seemed to him at first no one in the room save three middle-aged
women packing sweets; then in the corner he saw Barbara. The blood was
no longer in his head; he was pale, walking down that mahogany-coloured
room impregnated with the scent of wedding-cake. Barbara, too, was pale.

So close to her that he could count her every eyelash, and inhale the
scent of her hair and clothes to listen to her story of Miltoun, so
hesitatingly, so wistfully told, seemed very like being kept waiting
with the rope already round his neck, to hear about another person's
toothache. He felt this to have been unnecessary on the part of Fate!
And there came to him perversely the memory of that