bly tried
Mrs. Worthingham. Don't you really _mean_ to?" she gallantly insisted.

He waited again a little; then he brought out: "I'll tell you
presently." He came back, and as by still another mere glance over
the room, to what seemed to him so much nearer. "That table was old
Twelfth-Street?"

"Everything here was."

"Oh, the pure blessings! With you, ah, with you, I haven't to wear a
green shade." And he had retained meanwhile his small photograph, which
he again showed himself. "Didn't we talk of Mary Cardew?"

"Why, do you remember it?" She marvelled to extravagance.

"You make me. You connect me with it. You connect it with we." He liked
to display to her this excellent use she thus had, the service she
rendered. "There are so many connections--there will be so many. I
feel how, with you, they must all come up again for me: in fact you're
bringing them out already, just while I look at you, as fast as ever you
can. The fact that you knew every one--!" he went on; yet as if there
were more in that too than he could quite trust himself about.

"Yes, I knew every one," said Cornelia Rasch; but this time with perfect
simplicity. "I knew, I imagine, more than you do--or more than you did."

It kept him there, it made him wonder with his eyes on her. "Things
about _them_--our people?"

"Our people. Ours only now."

Ah, such an interest as he felt in this--taking from her while, so far
from scowling, he almost gaped, all it might mean! "Ours indeed--and it's
awfully good they are; or that we're still here for them! Nobody else
is--nobody but you: not a cat!"

"Well, I _am_ a cat!" Cornelia grinned.

"Do you mean you can tell me things--?" It was too beautiful to believe.

"About what really _was?_" she artfully considered, holding him
immensely now. "Well, unless they've come to you with time; unless
you've learned--or found out."

"Oh," he reassuringly cried--reassuringly, it most seemed, for
himself--"nothing has come to me with time, everything has gone from me.
How can I find out now! What creature has an idea----?"

She threw up her hands with the shrug of old days--the sharp little
shrug his sisters used to imitate and that she hadn't had to go to
Europe for. The only thing was that he blessed her for bringing it back.

"Ah, the ideas of people now----!"

"Yes, their ideas are certainly not about us" But he ruefully faced it.
"We've none the less, however, to live with them."

"With their ideas