"No; she was not like that. Because she was dying of the same disease as her husband. She had contracted it from him. That was why she had never let me be much with him, or afterwards with her. When I knew, I was willing to risk it, but she was not. She had her rules, and from them she never departed. She let me sit with her in the garden, and to the last she was carried out to her long chair so that I might be with her. She told me it was the happiest time of her life. I found that from the first she had loved me, and she loved me to the last. She never reproached me for leaving her. She was a simple person. I told her I had done it on account of my friend, and she thought it very noble of me, and said it was just what she should have expected of me. There was no irony in her. And she slipped quietly out of life, keeping her ideal of me to the last." "I think it was noble too," said Janey stolidly. "Was it? I never considered her for a moment. I had had the desire to serve her, but I never served her. Instead, I caused her long, long unhappiness--for my friend had a difficult temperament--and suffering and early death. I never realized that she was alive, vulnerable, sensitive. I should have done better to have married her and devoted myself to her. I have never wanted to devote myself to any woman since. We should have been happy together. And she might have been with me still, and we might have had a son who would just have been the right age to marry Miss Georges." "You would not have wanted him to marry her now," said Janey hoarsely. "You would not want her to marry anyone you were fond of." Among a confusion of tangled threads Mr. Stirling saw a clue--at last. A dragon-fly alighted on the stone at his feet, its long orange body and its gauze wings gleaming in the vivid sunshine. It stood motionless save for its golden eyes. Even at that moment, his mind, intent on another object, unconsciously noted and registered the transparent shadow on the stone of its transparent wings. "I think," he said, "if I had had a son who was trying to marry her, I should have come to you just as I have come now, and I should have said, 'Why should anyone but you and I ever know?'" "No. No, you wouldn't," said Janey, as if desperately defending some position which he was attacking. "You would want to save him at all costs." "From what? From the woman he loves? I have not found it such great happiness to be saved from the woman I loved." Janey hesitated, and then said-- "From some one unworthy of him." Mr. Stirling watched an amber leaf sail to the ground. Then he said slowly--