hardly suppose that I've forgotten it."

"What has it to do with you, or me--or this?"

"Not much, perhaps; but still something, you'll admit."

"I admit nothing. I can't bear your ever having thought of it. I wish
you hadn't told me. It spoils everything."

"Does it? Such a little thing? Surely a friend might be allowed to
leave you a small legacy when he was decently dead? And it wasn't
_his_ fault, was it, if it paid a debt as well?"

The tears rose in her eyes to answer him.

"But you see I didn't leave it. I didn't wait for that. I was afraid
that my being dead would put you in a more embarrassing position than
if I'd been alive. You might have hated those poems and yet you might
have shrunk from suppressing them for fear of wounding the immortal
vanity of a blessed spirit. Or you might have taken that horrid
literary view I implored you not to take. You might have hesitated to
inflict so great a loss on the literature of your country." He tried
to speak lightly, as if it were merely a whimsical and extravagant
notion that he should be reckoned among the poets. And yet in his
heart he knew that it must be so. "But now the things can't be
published unless you will accept them as they were originally meant.
There's nothing gross about the transaction; nothing that need offend
either you or me."

"I can't--I can't--"

"Well," he said gently, fearing the appearance of grossness in
pressing the question, "we can settle that afterwards, can't we?
Meanwhile at all events the publication rests with you."

"The publication has nothing whatever to do with me--The dedication,
_perhaps_."

"You've accepted that. Still, you might object to your name appearing
before the public with mine."

Lucia looked bewildered. She thought she had followed him in all his
subtleties; but she had had difficulty in realizing that he was
actually proposing to suppress his poems in deference to her
scruples, if she had any. Some shadowy notion of his meaning was
penetrating her now.

"My name," she said, "will mean nothing to the public."

"Then you consent?"

"Of course. It's absurd to talk about my consent. Besides, why should
I mind now--when it is all over?"

He was silent for a moment. When he spoke again, it was by an effort,
as if he unwillingly obeyed some superior constraint. "If it hadn't
been all over would you have minded then? Would you have refused your
consent?"

"To your publishing your own poems? How could I