The pretty comedy to which Brian had referred had been running with something of regularity for over six months; the staging of it had been a more costly matter than Comethup had believed possible. His own expenses were small enough--indeed, he cut them down to the lowest figure; but Brian had seen in him an inexhaustible mine, from which he could demand whatever he wanted at any moment, light-heartedly enough. To do Brian justice, he had no knowledge of what the actual sum was on which his cousin had to depend, nor, indeed, did he care. He held the younger man strictly to his bargain--even threatened desertion, at the slightest remonstrance on Comethup's part against reckless expenditure. 'Linda had no suspicion of the true state of affairs; she knew that there was always plenty of money, that they went out a great deal, that many well-known and clever people came to their house, that their doings when they went into the country or abroad were chronicled for all the world to read. Brian, _her_ Brian, of whom she was so fond and so proud, had produced another book of verses, and the people she met talked to her about them, even quoted lines of them; they sometimes coupled her husband's name with the names of certain wondrous young poets of bygone days. It was a never-failing source of delight that he had, on an impulse, dedicated this last book "To the Woman who stands always most near to Me." She knew what that meant; she kissed the dear lines on the printed page again and again because she was so proud to think that all the world knew what it meant, and knew to whom the poet referred. If, sometimes, at her own house or in the houses of others she met a tall, grave-faced man who said little to any one and who generally lounged in doorways or in out-of-the-way corners; if sometimes--indeed, very often--she glanced at him to find his eyes looking wistfully at her; if, in the dead of night, when she could not sleep sometimes, she had a sudden remembrance of him and of his loneliness, and of the old garden far away, where they had whispered together, it was all so fleeting--just a little breath of pain, as it were, across the perfect happiness of her days--that she forgot it at once and was glad to think that he must have left his sorrow behind him long ago, and have ceased to trouble about what could never be. In those months she was so supremely happy and her life was so crowded that she could not bear to think that any one else was unhappy through any mistake of hers, and so dismissed the matter at last, feeling sure that he too had dismissed it long since.