"Kind? Good Lord, yes. There are millions of kind people in the world. It's possible to be kind and at the same time not entirely brainless." "He wouldn't mind that. He wouldn't think she was brainless--" "He wasn't in love with her--there was another woman--a girl. It was so like the dear old duffer to put it off till he was forty-five and then come a cropper over a little girl of seventeen." "That isn't true. I knew him much better than you do. He never cared for anybody but her.... Besides, if it was true you shouldn't have told me. I've no business to know it...." "Everybody knew it. The poor dear managed so badly that everybody in the place knew it. She knew, that's why she dragged him away and made him live abroad. She hated living abroad, but she liked it better than seeing him going to pieces over the girl." "I don't believe it. If there was anything in it I'd have been sure to have heard of it.... Why, there wasn't anybody here but me--" "It must have been years before your time," he said. "You could hardly even have come in for the sad end of it." * * * * * Dorsy Heron said it was true. "It was you he was in love with. Everybody saw it but you." She remembered. His face when she came to him. In the library. And what he had said. "A man might be in love with you for ten years and you wouldn't know about it if he held his tongue." And _her_ face. Her poor face, so worried when people saw them together. And that last night when she stroked your arm and when she saw him looking at it and stopped. And her eyes. Frightened. Frightened. "How I must have hurt him. How I must have hurt them both." * * * * * Mr. Nicholson had come back on Friday as he had said. III. He put down his scratching pen and was leaning back in his chair, looking at her. She wondered what he was thinking. Sometimes the space of the room was enormous between her table by the first tall window and his by the third; sometimes it shrank and brought them close. It was bringing them close now. "You can't see the text for the footnotes," she said. "The notes must go in the Appendix." She wanted to make herself forget that all her own things, the things she had saved from the last burning, were lying there on his table, staring at her. She was trying not to look that way, not to let herself imagine for a moment that he had read them. "Never mind the notes and the Appendix." He had got up. He was leaning now against the tall shutter of her window, looking down at her. "Why didn't you tell me? Before I let you in for that horrible drudgery? All that typing and indexing--If I'd only known you were doing anything like this.... Why couldn't you have told me?" "Because I wasn't doing it. It was done ages ago." "It's my fault. I ought to have known. I did know there was something. I ought to have attended to it and found out what it was."