"What an awfully handsome fellow!" said Hester in a low voice, "though you wouldn't let me see it properly. I say, Auntie, won't you tell me--?" "Tell you what?" "Who he was--and why I never saw it before? I thought I knew all your things by heart--and now you've been keeping something from me!" The girl's tone had changed to one of curious resentment. "You know how you scold _me_ when you think I've got a secret." "That is quite different, Hester." Miss Puttenham tried to rise, but Hester, who was leaning against her knee, prevented it. "Why is it different?" she said, audaciously. "You always say you--you--want to be everything to me--and then you hide things from me--and I--" She raised herself, sitting upright on the floor, her hands round her knees, and spoke with extraordinary animation and sparkling eyes. "Why, I should have loved you twice as much, Aunt Alice--and you know I _do_ love you!--if you'd told me more about yourself. The people _I_ care about are the people who _live_--and feel--and do things! There's verse in one of your books"--she pointed to a little bookshelf of poets on a table near--"I always think of it when mamma reads the 'Christian Year' to us on Sunday evenings-- Out of dangers, dreams, disasters _We_ arise, to be your masters!" "_We_--the people who want to know, and feel, and _fight_! We who loathe all the humdrum _bourgeois_ talk--'don't do this--don't do that!' Aunt Alsie, there's a German line, too, you know it--' _Was uns alle baendigt, das Gemeine'_--don't you hate it too--_das Gemeine?_" the word came with vehemence through the white teeth. "And how can we escape it--we women--except through freedom--through asserting ourselves--through love, of course? It all comes to love!--love that mamma says one ought not to talk about. I wouldn't talk about it, if it only meant what it means to Sarah and Lulu--I'd scorn to!" She stopped--and looked with her blazing and wonderful eyes at her companion--her lips parted. Then she suddenly stooped and kissed the cold hand trying to withdraw itself from hers. "Who was he, dear?"--she laid the hand caressingly against her cheek--"I'm good at secrets!" Alice Puttenham wrenched herself free, and rose tottering to her feet. "He is dead, Hester--and you mustn't speak of it to me--or any one--again." She leant against the mantelpiece trying to recover herself--but in vain. "I'm rather faint," she said at last, putting out a groping hand. "No, don't come!--I'm all right--I'll go upstairs and rest. I got overtired this morning." And she went feebly toward the door.