made up
to her for. We had talked again and again of the man who had brought us
together, of his talent, his character, his personal charm, his certain
career, his dreadful doom, and even of his clear purpose in that great
study which was to have been a supreme literary portrait, a kind of
critical Vandyke or Velasquez. She had conveyed to me in abundance that
she was tongue-tied by her perversity, by her piety, that she would
never break the silence it had not been given to the "right person," as
she said, to break. The hour however finally arrived. One evening when I
had been sitting with her longer than usual I laid my hand firmly on her
arm.

"Now, at last, what _is_ it?"

She had been expecting me; she was ready. She gave a long, slow,
soundless headshake, merciful only in being inarticulate. This mercy
didn't prevent its hurling at me the largest, finest, coldest "Never!"
I had yet, in the course of a life that had known denials, had to take
full in the face. I took it and was aware that with the hard blow the
tears had come into my eyes. So for a while we sat and looked at each
other; after which I slowly rose. I was wondering if some day she would
accept me; but this was not what I brought out. I said as I smoothed
down my hat: "I know what to think then; it's nothing!"

A remote, disdainful pity for me shone out of her dim smile; then she
exclaimed in a voice that I hear at this moment: "It's my _life!_" As I
stood at the door she added: "You've insulted him!"

"Do you mean Vereker?"

"I mean--the Dead!"

I recognised when I reached the street the justice of her charge. Yes,
it was her life--I recognised that too; but her life none the less made
room with the lapse of time for another interest. A year and a half
after Corvick's death she published in a single volume her second novel,
"Overmastered," which I pounced on in the hope of finding in it some
tell-tale echo or some peeping face. All I found was a much better book
than her younger performance, showing I thought the better company she
had kept. As a tissue tolerably intricate it was a carpet with a figure
of its own; but the figure was not the figure I was looking for. On
sending a review of it to _The Middle_ I was surprised to learn from the
office that a notice was already in type. When the paper came out I
had no hesitation in attributing this article, which I thought rather
vulgarly overdone, to Drayton Deane, who in the old days had been
s