Then, as Helena still made movements to rise, the elder woman got up slowly, leaning as she did so all her weight on her friend. “Where is the coffee?” she asked, affecting the dullness of lethargy. She was full of small affectations, being consumed with uneasy love. “I think, my dear,” replied Helena, “it is in its usual place.” “Oh—o-o-oh!” yawned Louisa, and she dragged herself out. The two had been intimate friends for years, had slept together, and played together and lived together. Now the friendship was coming to an end. “After all,” said Byrne, when the door was closed, “if you’re alive you’ve got to live.” Helena burst into a titter of amusement at this sudden remark. “Wherefore?” she asked indulgently. “Because there’s no such thing as passive existence,” he replied, grinning. She curled her lip in amused indulgence of this very young man. “I don’t see it at all,” she said. “You can’t, he protested, “any more than a tree can help budding in April—it can’t help itself, if it’s alive; same with you.” “Well, then”—and again there was the touch of a sneer—“if I can’t help myself, why trouble, my friend?” “Because—because I suppose _I_ can’t help myself—if it bothers me, it does. You see, I”—he smiled brilliantly—“am April.” She paid very little attention to him, but began in a peculiar reedy, metallic tone, that set his nerves quivering: “But I am not a bare tree. All my dead leaves, they hang to me—and—and go through a kind of _danse macabre_—” “But you bud underneath—like beech,” he said quickly. “Really, my friend,” she said coldly, “I am too tired to bud.” “No,” he pleaded, “no!” With his thick brows knitted, he surveyed her anxiously. She had received a great blow in August, and she still was stunned. Her face, white and heavy, was like a mask, almost sullen. She looked in the fire, forgetting him. “You want March,” he said—he worried endlessly over her—“to rip off your old leaves. I s’ll have to be March,” he laughed. She ignored him again because of his presumption. He waited awhile, then broke out once more. “You must start again—you must. Always you rustle your red leaves of a blasted summer. You are not dead. Even if you want to be, you’re not. Even if it’s a bitter thing to say, you have to say it: you are not dead….” Smiling a peculiar, painful smile, as if he hurt her, she turned to gaze at a photograph that hung over the piano. It was the profile of a handsome man in the prime of life. He was leaning slightly forward, as if yielding beneath a burden of life, or to the pull of fate. He looked out musingly, and there was no hint of rebellion in the contours of the regular features. The hair was brushed back, soft and thick, straight from his fine brow. His nose was small and shapely, his chin rounded, cleft, rather beautifully moulded. Byrne gazed also at the photo. His look became distressed and helpless.