eady."

"_She_ wouldn't have plagued you night and day."

He owned it.

"Isn't it rather a pity that she ever left?"

"Why, what else could the poor woman do?"

"Stay, of course."

He had never thought of that solution; he would, if he had been asked,
have judged it unthinkable.

"Supposing," said Jinny, "you asked her, very nicely, to come
back--don't you think that would save us?"

No; he never would have thought of it himself; but since she had put it
that way, as saving them, saving Jinny, that was to say; well, he owned,
wouldn't it?

"I say, but wouldn't you mind?" he said at last.

"Why should I?" said she.

In the afternoon of the next day, which was a Sunday, Brodrick appeared
at the house in Augustus Road. He asked to see Miss Collett, who was
staying there with her cousin.

She came to him, as she used to come to him in his study, with her
uplifted, sacrificial face, holding herself stiffly and tensely, half in
surrender, half resisting the impulse that drew her.

He laid the situation before her, curtly.

"If you were to come back," he said, "it would solve all our problems."

She reddened, suspecting, as was her way, significance in everything
that Brodrick said. Did he, she wondered, recognize that she too had her
problem; and was he providing for her too the simple and beautiful
solution? It was possible, then, she argued inwardly, that in some way
that was not any other man's way, in some immaterial and perfect way, he
cared. There was after all a tie. He desired, as she had desired, to
preserve it in its purity and its perfection.

Putting all that aside, it remained certain that she was indispensable.

There was a deepening in the grey shallows of her eyes; they darted such
light as comes only from the deeps. Her upper lip quivered with a
movement that was between a tremor and a smile, subtler than either.

"Are you sure," she said, "that Mrs. Brodrick wouldn't mind?"

"Jinny? Oh dear me, no. It was her idea."

Her face changed again. The light and flush of life withdrew. Her
sallowness returned. She had the fixed look of one who watches the
perishing under her eyes of a beloved dream.

"And you," she said, as if she read him, "are not quite sure whether you
really want me?"

"Should I ask you if I didn't want you? My only doubt was whether you
would care to come. Will you?"

He looked at her with his intent look. It bore some faint resemblance to
the look he had for Jane.