“She was twenty-six last June,” said Anita finally. “Midsummer Day. I know.” “June!” He caught it up. “Just so—June! Isn’t that characteristic? Isn’t that Madala all over? Of course she was born in June. She would be. She _was_ June. June—— “Her lips and her roses yet maiden A summer of storm in her eyes——” Miss Howe winced. “For God’s sake don’t Swinburnize, Jasper! She’s not your meat. Oh, I want to cry—I want to cry! Dead—at twenty-six——” “In child-bed,” finished Anita bitterly, and her voice made it an unclean and shameful end. Mr. Flood’s glance felt its way over her, hatefully. It never lifted to her face. “Of course from your point of view, dear lady——” he began, and smiled as he made his little bow of attention. I thought him insolent, and so, I believe, did Miss Howe. She lifted her head sharply and I thought she would have spoken; but Anita gave her no time. There was always a sort of thick-skinned valiance about Anita. “Oh, but you all know my point of view. She knew it herself. I never concealed it. You know how I devoted myself——” “A bye-word, a bye-word!” said Miss Howe under her breath. “—but not so much to her as to her gift. I should never allow a personal sentiment to overpower me. I haven’t the time for it. But she had the call, she had the gift, and because she had it I say, as I have always said, that for Madala Grey, marriage——” “And all it implies——” Mr. Flood was still smiling. She accepted it. “Marriage and all that it implies was apostasy. I stand for Literature.” “And Literature,” with a glance at the others, “is honoured.” They wearied me. It seemed to me that they sparked and fizzled and whirred with the sham life of machinery: and like machinery they affected me. For at first I could not hear anything but them, and then they confused and tired me, and last of all they faded into a mere wall-paper of sound, and I forgot that they were there, save that I wondered now and then, as stray sentences shrilled out of the buzz, that they were not yet oppressed into silence. For there was grief abroad—a grief without shape, without sound, without expression—a quality, a pulsing essence, a distillation of pure pain. From some centre it rayed out, it spread, it settled upon the room, imperceptibly, like the fall of dust. It reached me. I felt it. It soaked into me. I ached with it. I could not sit quiet. I was not drawn, I was impelled. _Dead_—the dull, bewildered voice was still in my ears. _That_ I heard. But it was statement, not appeal. It was not his suffering that demanded relief, but some responding capacity for pain in me that awoke and cried out restlessly that such anguish was unlawful, beyond endurance, that still it I must, I must! I rose. I looked round me. Then I went very softly into the outer room.