"You've got such dear little hands," she was saying as she held out the gloves, "These ar'n't big enough for me. I paid a heathen price for them, and this bag's a bit handier than yours." But in spite of her pleasant words, her pallor was so extreme as she held out the gloves and bag, that her aunt whose eyes were again very bright and not alone with fever, noted it anxiously. "Oh, my little, little Fanny," she cried in quite a strong voice, and even held out her arms. She shared, in a way she could not have expressed, Fanny's grief whatever it was. She didn't want Fanny, dear, gold Fanny to suffer. Fanny _mustn't_ suffer. Fanny _mustn't_ weep. She wanted to live a long, long time, even uncomfortably, denudedly, so that out of the whole careless world, Fanny might always have someone who truly loved her. Then she became aware, for the first time, of something that intimately concerned herself. The shape and color of her own life.... Loving the children of three other women had been _her_ life. Her middle class life, undisturbing and for so long undisturbed. One day, one year, like another, always loving the children of three other women ... looking through the same windows at the same things. And suddenly now Fanny's world, Fanny's strange world.... It had other horizons, red horizons behind dark mountains with their secrets. But of these secrets her aunt was not thinking. She only knew, as she stood close to Fanny, that it was her own flesh and blood that was suffering,--beautiful and suffering. How Fanny's beauty threw a bright, blinding cloud about everything that concerned her! She said again: "My darling child, my beautiful child, don't weep," as Fanny pressed against her, and she comforted her as she might have done in the far off years for girlish griefs. Had she reflected she might have changed her old motto into "Beauty stays, Virtue goes." She was breaking in Fanny's house for a last time her alabaster box of precious spikenard. From it, in the blue room, a strong fragrance came, over-powering the scent of lily of the valley from an expensive shop in the Graben that hung about Fanny's clothes, and the thin perfume of the too-early blossomed plant. She was thinking only of Fanny's generosity and why she could indulge those many generous impulses she thought not at all,--just as if the family didn't lower their voices when speaking of Fanny and look around to see that the children weren't there. She felt, too, intimately joined to Fanny. Deeply beneath consciousness was that feeling that Fanny was yet to give her something essential, had some ultimate gift for her, that she must be there to receive.... That it was to be her deathbed she didn't know. She only felt that something final and priceless would come through Fanny. And truly 'tis a great thing to give any one. For mostly each one, no matter how he wanders or is denuded, has, in some strange way, his own. * * * * *