use, you know," she added, "it's
all."

"It's enough!" he returned with a slight thoughtful droop of his head to
the right and his eyes attached to the far horizon as through a shade of
shyness for what he was saying. He felt all her own lingering nearness
somehow on his cheek.

"It's enough? Thank you then!" she rather oddly went on.

He shifted a little his posture. "It was more than a hundred a year--for
you to get together."

"Yes," she assented, "that was what year by year I tried for."

"But that you could live all the while and save that--!" Yes, he was
at liberty, as he hadn't been, quite pleasantly to marvel. All his
wonderments in life had been hitherto unanswered--and didn't the change
mean that here again was the social relation?

"Ah, I didn't live as you saw me the other day."

"Yes," he answered--and didn't he the next instant feel he must fairly
have smiled with it?--"the other day you _were_ going it!"

"For once in my life," said Kate Cookham. "I've left the hotel," she
after a moment added.

"Ah, you're in--a--lodgings?" he found himself inquiring as for positive
sociability.

She had apparently a slight shade of hesitation, but in an instant it
was all right; as what he showed he wanted to know she seemed mostly to
give him. "Yes--but far of course from here. Up on the hill." To which,
after another instant, "At The Mount, Castle Terrace," she subjoined.

"Oh, I _know_ The Mount. And Castle Terrace is awfully sunny and nice."

"Awfully sunny and nice," Kate Cookham took from him.

"So that if it isn't," he pursued, "like the Royal, why you're at least
comfortable."

"I shall be comfortable anywhere now," she replied with a certain
dryness.

It was astonishing, however, what had become of his own. "Because I've
accepted----?"

"Call it that!" she dimly smiled.

"I hope then at any rate," he returned, "you can now thoroughly rest" He
spoke as for a cheerful conclusion and moved again also to smile, though
as with a poor grimace, no doubt; since what he seemed most clearly to
feel was that since he "accepted" he mustn't, for his last note, have
accepted in sulkiness or gloom. With that, at the same time, he couldn't
but know, in all his fibres, that with such a still-watching face as the
dotty veil didn't disguise for him there was no possible concluding, at
least on his part On hers, on hers it was--as he had so often for a week
had reflectively to pronounce things--another affair