ld stand a good deal, the wind and rain of cruel fact.
She wouldn't break.

"Lydia," said he, "you are beautiful to me. But I can't let you go on
seeming beautiful, if--if you're so divinely kind to me and believing,
and everything that's foolish--and dear."

"You mean," said Lydia, "you're afraid I should think wrong thoughts
about you--because there's Esther. Oh, I know there's Esther. But I
didn't mean to be wicked. And you didn't. It was so--so above things. So
above everything."

Her voice trembled too much for her to manage it. He glanced at her and
saw her lip was twitching violently, and savagely thought a man sometime
would have a right to kiss it. And yet what did he care? To kiss a
woman's lips was a madness or a splendour that passed. He knew there
might be, almost incredibly, another undying passion that did last, made
up of endurance and loyalty and the free rough fellowship between men.
This girl, this soft yet unyielding thing, was capable of that. But she
must not squander it on him who was bankrupt. Yet here she was, in her
house of dreams, tended by divine ministrants of the ideal: the old
lying servitors that let us believe life is what we make it and deaf to
the creatures raging there outside who swear it is made irrevocably for
us. He was sure they lied, these servitors in the house of maiden
dreams. Yet how to tell her so! And would he do it if he could?

"You see," he said irrelevantly, "I want you to have your life."

"It will be my life," she said. "To take care of Farvie, as we always
have. To make things nice for you in the house. I don't believe you and
Farvie'd like it at all without Anne and me."

She was announcing, he saw, quite plainly, that she didn't want a
romantic pact with him. They had met, just once, for an instant, in the
meeting of their lips, and Lydia had simply taken that shred of
triumphant life up to the mountain-top to weave her nest of it: a nest
where she was to warm all sorts of brooding wonders for him and for her
father. There was nothing to be done with her in her innocence, her
ignorance, her beauty of devotion.

"It doesn't make any difference about me," he said. "I'm out of the
running in every possible way. But it makes a lot of difference about
you and Anne."

"It doesn't make any difference to Anne," said Lydia astutely, "because
she's going to heaven, and so she doesn't care about what she has here."

He was most amusedly anxious to know whether Lyd