"I should like to feel that anything so important depended on me," she said. "I should like the sense of power. I am very fond of power." "I once heard it said that you had a great deal of it," Tredennis said; "far more than most women." She smiled again, a trifle less languidly. "That is Laurence Arbuthnot," she observed. "I always recognize his remarks when I hear them. He did not mean a compliment exactly, either, though it sounds rather like one. He has a theory that I affect people strongly, and he chooses to call that power. But it is too trivial. It is only a matter of pleasing or displeasing, and I am obliged to exert myself. It does not enable me to bestow things, and be a potentate. I think that to be a potentate might console one for a great many things,--and for the lack of a great many. If you can't take, it must distract your attention to be able to give." "I do not like to hear you speak as if the chief thing to be desired was the ability to distract one's self," Tredennis said. She paused a second. "Then," she said, "I will not speak so now. To-day I will do nothing you do not like." Then she added, "As it is your last day, I wish to retrieve myself." "What have you to retrieve?" he asked. "Myself," she answered, "as I said." She spread the letter upon her lap, and gave her attention to it. "Isn't it rather like Richard," she said, "that, when he begins to write, he invariably writes a letter like that? Theoretically he detests correspondence, but when he once begins, his letter always interests him, and even awakens him to a kind of enthusiasm, so that instead of being brief he tells one everything. He has written twelve pages here, and it is all delightful." "That is a wonderful thing to do," remarked Tredennis; "but it does not surprise me in Richard." "No," she replied, "Richard can always interest himself; or, rather, he does not interest _himself_,--it is that he is interested without making an effort; that is his strong point." She replaced the letter in the envelope and laid it in the basket, from which she took a strip of lace-work, beginning to employ herself with it in a manner more suggestive of graceful leisure than of industrious intention. It seemed to accentuate the fact that they had nothing to do but let the day drift by in luxurious idleness. But Tredennis could not help seeing that for a while the tone of her mood, so to speak, was lowered. And yet, curiously enough, nothing of his own dreamy exaltation died away. The subtle shadow which seemed to have touched her, for a moment, only intensified his feeling of tenderness. In fact there were few things which would not have so intensified it; his mental condition was one which must advance by steady, silent steps of development to its climax. He was not by nature a reckless man, but he was by no means unconscious that there was something very like recklessness in his humor this last day.