. Ah, somehow,
both formidably and helpfully, her face concluded--yet in a sense so
strangely enshrouded in things she didn't tell him. What _must_ she,
what mustn't she, have done? What she had said--and she had really told
him nothing--was no account of her life; in the midst of which conflict
of opposed recognitions, at any rate, it was as if, for all he could
do, he himself now considerably floundered. "But I can't think--I can't
think----!"

"You can't think I can have made so much money in the time and been
honest?"

"Oh, you've been _honest!_" Herbert Dodd distinctly allowed.

It moved her stillness to a gesture--which, however, she had as promptly
checked; and she went on the next instant as for further generosity to
his failure of thought. "Everything was possible, under my stress, with
my hatred."

"Your hatred--?" For she had paused as if it were after all too
difficult.

"Of what I should for so long have been doing to you."

With this, for all his failures, a greater light than any yet shone upon
him. "It made you think of ways----?"

"It made me think of everything. It made me work," said Kate Cookham.
She added, however, the next moment: "But that's my story."

"And I mayn't hear it?"

"No--because I mayn't hear yours."

"Oh, mine--!" he said with the strangest, saddest, yet after all most
resigned sense of surrender of it; which he tried to make sound as if he
couldn't have told it, for its splendor of sacrifice and of misery, even
if he would.

It seemed to move in her a little, exactly, that sense of the invidious.
"Ah, mine too, I assure you----!"

He rallied at once to the interest. "Oh, we _can_ talk then?"

"Never," she all oddly replied. "Never," said Kate Cookham.

They remained so, face to face; the effect of which for him was that he
had after a little understood why. That was fundamental. "Well, I see."

Thus confronted they stayed; and then, as he saw with a contentment that
came up from deeper still, it was indeed she who, with her worn fine
face, would conclude. "But I can take care of you."

"You _have!_" he said as with nothing left of him but a beautiful
appreciative candour.

"Oh, but you'll want it now in a way--!" she responsibly answered.

He waited a moment, dropping again on the seat. So, while she still
stood, he looked up at her; with the sense somehow that there were too
many things and that they were all together, terribly, irresistibly,
doubtless blesse