in all their long acquaintance there had never been an event. This one grew larger when, five minutes later, in the faint elegance of her little drawing-room, she quavered out a greeting that showed the measure she took of it. He had a strange sense of having come for something in particular; strange because literally there was nothing particular between them, nothing save that they were at one on their great point, which had long ago become a magnificent matter of course. It was true that after she had said “You can always come now, you know,” the thing he was there for seemed already to have happened. He asked her if it was the death of her aunt that made the difference; to which she replied: “She never knew I knew you. I wished her not to.” The beautiful clearness of her candour—her faded beauty was like a summer twilight—disconnected the words from any image of deceit. They might have struck him as the record of a deep dissimulation; but she had always given him a sense of noble reasons. The vanished aunt was present, as he looked about him, in the small complacencies of the room, the beaded velvet and the fluted moreen; and though, as we know, he had the worship of the Dead, he found himself not definitely regretting this lady. If she wasn’t in his long list, however, she was in her niece’s short one, and Stransom presently observed to the latter that now at least, in the place they haunted together, she would have another object of devotion. “Yes, I shall have another. She was very kind to me. It’s that that’s the difference.”