"But she thanked me in a sort of throaty whisper, and sat for a while letting the neck of the guitar lie against her shoulder, while her left hand went up to clasp it and finger it in the old way. And her right hand lifted itself once or twice towards the sounding-hole, but dropped back to her lap. "'You are very good to me,' she said, after some seconds, still in the same whisper. 'Why is it that you hate Pete so?' Then, as I did not answer, she went on, 'I am dying, I think. It would be quite safe to tell me, now.' "'When two men love one woman--' I began. But she shook her head, and her eyes accused me. Santa had very beautiful eyes, and in this agony they were perhaps deeper in colour and more beautiful than ever. But they had changed, somehow. . . . I cannot explain it but they recalled another pair of eyes . . . another woman's. . . . Whose? . . . I don't know! My mother's, maybe. She died, you know, when I was quite a small boy. . . . Anyway, these eyes quite suddenly looked at me out of the past--out of my memory, as it were. They were Santa's and yet they were not Santa's. . . . "'Ah,' said she, 'do not lie to me, now! It hurts so!' "'Well, then,' I told her, 'your husband once, back in the past, did me a very great wrong. It--well, it wrecked the work of my life, and I have never forgiven it. Now let us talk no more about it.' "A look of relief, almost a happy look, dawned on her face. 'I _knew_ it was not about me! For I saw your two faces when you met on the hill, under my porchway. . . . Do you know that, at moments, you are very much alike? . . . Oh, in general, of course, there is no likeness at all. . . . But at certain moments. . . . And it was so when you met, there on the hill: I had to look from one to the other. It was plain in that instant that you hated one another--yes, and it might have been for a long time . . . ages and ages. But it could not have been about me, for you had not set eyes on me but within the minute. . . . I am glad, anyway, that it is not for my sake that you hate.' "Her words came in faint, hurrying wafts, much as for days the wind had been ruffling after us. The sunset struck slantwise across her cheek and hung entangled in the brown tress that drooped low by her right temple. I tell you, Roddy, that if the old gods and goddesses in our school-books ever turned out to be mortal after all, she was one, and thus looked, and spoke as she died. . . . "'I understand well enough,' she went on, 'the small things over which women quarrel. . . . Though they all seem very far away just now, I was a woman and could be jealous over _any of them_. But I never understood why _men_ quarrelled, except for me, of course. . . . Was it over your work, do you tell me?' "'Surely,' said I, 'a man's work--'