me, let alone like me."

"He does like you, dear Miss Quincey, I know he does."

"How do you know?"

"He told me so." (Miss Quincey quivered and a faint flush worked up
through the sallow of her cheek.) "And I'm sure he would be most
distressed to think you were unhappy."

"It is not unhappiness; certainly not unhappiness. On the contrary I have
been happy, quite happy lately. And I think it has been bad for me. I
wasn't used to it. Perhaps, if it had happened five-and-twenty years
ago--Do not misunderstand me, I am merely speaking of friendship, dear;
but it might--I mean I might--"

Far back in the chair and favoured by Rhoda's silence, Miss Quincey
dropped into a dream. Presently she woke up as it were with a start.

"What am I thinking of? Let us be reasonable; let us reduce it to
figures. Forty-five--thirty--he is thirty. Take twenty-five from thirty
and five remain. Why, Rhoda, he would have been--"

They looked at each other, but neither said: "He would have been five
years old."

Miss Quincey seemed quite prostrated by the result of her calculations.
To everything that Rhoda could urge to soothe her she answered steadily:

"You do not know him as I do."

The voice was not Miss Quincey's voice; it was the monotonous, melancholy
voice of the Fixed Idea.

Her knowledge of him. After all, nothing could take from her the
exquisite privacy of that possession.

* * * * *

"_Eros anikate machan_," said Rhoda.

Miss Quincey was gone and the Classical Mistress was in school again,
coaching a backward student through the "Antigone."

"Oh Love, unconquered in fight. Love who--Love who fliest, who fliest
about among things," said the student. And the teacher laughed.

Laughed, for the entertaining blunder called up a vivid image of the god
in Miss Quincey's drawing-room, fluttering about among the furniture and
doing terrific damage with his wings.

"What's wrong?" asked the student.

"Oh nothing; only a slight confusion between flying about and falling
upon. 'Oh Love who fallest on the prey'; please go on."

"'Oh Love who fallest on the prey'--" The chorus mumbled and stumbled,
and the student sighed heavily, for the Greek was hard. "He who has--he
who has--Oh dear, I can't see any sense in these old choruses; I do hate
them."

"Still," said Rhoda sweetly, "you mustn't murder them. 'He who has love
has madness.'"

The chorus limped to its end and the student left th