intervening scenes to be read, preferring a short summary in George’s own words to fill up the blanks thus made in the story. _Othello_ she would suffer in the same way, and _King Lear_, _The Merchant of Venice_, and _The Taming of the Shrew_; and she was never tired of the description of the death of Ophelia. The _Idylls of the King_ she preferred for the most part without the poetry, but she learned by heart _The Lady of Shalott_, _The Moated Grange_, and other pieces which presented ladies in a picturesque and romantic light. Some portions of _Hiawatha_ had a strong fascination for her, and as, again and again, George read to her the account of the death of Minne-haha, he would feel her arms tighten round his neck, and hear her breath come short with intense interest and emotion close to his ear. “Would you feel like that if I died?” she asked abruptly one evening, laying her hand across the page when he had read to the end. “My child, my child, don’t ask me,” whispered George, overcome and thrown off his balance by a sudden realisation of the strong hold this little fragile woman-creature had got upon his whole nature, of the paralysing dead blank her absence would now make in his life. “I don’t think, my wife, that I should live long after you,” he said in a grave, deep voice, laying his right hand upon her shoulder, and tightening the clasp of his left arm round her waist. “Really? Would you die too, like the people in poetry?” she asked, delighted, rubbing her round young cheek against his in appreciation of the appropriateness of his answer. But then, examining him at her leisure, a doubt crossed her mind, and as she spanned the muscles of his arm with her little fingers she shook her head. “A man is so strong, so wise, and has so much more to do in the world than a woman, that I think he could not die off just when it pleased him,” she said thoughtfully. “There are always Nounas in the world, I think, just like flies and flowers, and silly useless things like that. If one goes, one knows it must go, and one does not miss it. And a man sees that, and he says, ‘Ah, it is a pity!’ and then he goes on living, and the grass grows up on the grave, and he forgets. After all it was only a little flower, only a little fly. And so while we are alive we must just be sweet, we must just fly about and buzz, for when the little grave is made we don’t leave any trace. That is what I think,” ended Nouna with a half-grave, half-playful nod. But George could not take the speech playfully at all. This light but resolute refusal to take herself in earnest, which he ascribed to the paralysing influence of Eastern traditions, was the great barrier to all higher communion between them than that of caresses. By the expression of his face Nouna scented the sermon from afar, and as he opened his mouth to speak, she thrust her hand between his lips as a gag, and continued, laughing: