ns. I couldn't make you understand our harvest; it is of
the broad sun and the sincerity of things."

"I know I must seem to you dreadfully out of it," Alicia said, wearing,
as it were, across her heaviness a lighter cloud of trouble.

But the other would not be stayed; she followed by compulsion her
impulse to the end. "Shall I be quite candid?" she said. "I find the
atmosphere about you, dear, a trifle exhausted."

Alicia with a face of astonishment made a half movement towards the
window before she understood. There was some timidity in her glance at
Hilda and in her mechanical smile. "Oh," she said, "I see what you mean;
and I don't wonder. I am so literal--I have so little imagination."

"Don't talk of it as if it were money or fabric--something you could add
up or measure," Hilda cried remorselessly. "You have none!"

As if something slipped from her Alicia threw out locked hands. "At
least I had enough to know you when you came!" she cried. "I felt you,
too, and it's not my fault if there isn't enough of me to--to respond
properly. And I can't give you up. You seem to be the one valuable thing
that I can have--the only permanent fact that is left."

Hilda had a rebound of immense discomfort. "Who said anything about
giving up?" she interrupted.

"Why, you did! But I'm quite willing to believe you didn't mean it, if
you say so." She turned the appeal of her face and saw a sudden pitiful
consideration in Hilda's, and as if it called them forth two tears
sprang to her eyes and fell, as she lowered her delicate head upon her
lap.

"Dear thing! I didn't indeed. If I meant anything it was that I'm
overstrung. I've been horribly harried lately." She possessed herself
of one of Alicia's hands and stroked it. Alicia kept her head bent for
a moment and then let it fall, in sudden abandonment, upon the other
woman's shoulder. Her defences crumbled so utterly that Hilda felt
guilty of using absurdly heavy artillery. They sat together for a
moment or two in silence with only that supervening sense of successful
aggression between them, and the humiliation was Hilda's. Presently
it grew heavy, embarrassing. Alicia got up and began a slow, restless
pacing up and down before the alcove they sat in. Hilda watched her--it
was a rhythmic progress--and when she came near with a sound of brushing
silk and a faint fragrance which seemed a personal emanation, drew a
long breath as if she were an essence to be inhaled, and so, i