to live with him for thirty, or forty,
or fifty years, and to quarrel, and to be so close to him, she
was independent of him; she was independent of everything else.
Nevertheless, as St. John said, it was love that made her understand
this, for she had never felt this independence, this calm, and this
certainty until she fell in love with him, and perhaps this too was
love. She wanted nothing else.

For perhaps two minutes Miss Allan had been standing at a little
distance looking at the couple lying back so peacefully in their
arm-chairs. She could not make up her mind whether to disturb them or
not, and then, seeming to recollect something, she came across the hall.
The sound of her approach woke Terence, who sat up and rubbed his eyes.
He heard Miss Allan talking to Rachel.

"Well," she was saying, "this is very nice. It is very nice indeed.
Getting engaged seems to be quite the fashion. It cannot often happen
that two couples who have never seen each other before meet in the same
hotel and decide to get married." Then she paused and smiled, and seemed
to have nothing more to say, so that Terence rose and asked her whether
it was true that she had finished her book. Some one had said that
she had really finished it. Her face lit up; she turned to him with a
livelier expression than usual.

"Yes, I think I can fairly say I have finished it," she said. "That
is, omitting Swinburne--Beowulf to Browning--I rather like the two B's
myself. Beowulf to Browning," she repeated, "I think that is the kind of
title which might catch one's eye on a railway book-stall."

She was indeed very proud that she had finished her book, for no one
knew what an amount of determination had gone to the making of it. Also
she thought that it was a good piece of work, and, considering what
anxiety she had been in about her brother while she wrote it, she could
not resist telling them a little more about it.

"I must confess," she continued, "that if I had known how many classics
there are in English literature, and how verbose the best of them
contrive to be, I should never have undertaken the work. They only allow
one seventy thousand words, you see."

"Only seventy thousand words!" Terence exclaimed.

"Yes, and one has to say something about everybody," Miss Allan added.
"That is what I find so difficult, saying something different about
everybody." Then she thought that she had said enough about herself, and
she asked whether they ha