ely repeated, but with an increase of the
same effect. After which, conscious, she made, as if to save herself, a
quick addition. "Dear Mr. Longdon, isn't it rather yourself most--?"

"It would be easier for me," he went on, heedless, "if you didn't, my
poor child, so wonderfully love him."

"Ah but I don't--please believe me when I assure you I DON'T!" she broke
out. It burst from her, flaring up, in a queer quaver that ended in
something queerer still--in her abrupt collapse, on the spot, into the
nearest chair, where she choked with a torrent of tears. Her buried face
could only after a moment give way to the flood, and she sobbed in a
passion as sharp and brief as the flurry of a wild thing for an instant
uncaged; her old friend meantime keeping his place in the silence broken
by her sound and distantly--across the room--closing his eyes to his
helplessness and her shame. Thus they sat together while their trouble
both conjoined and divided them. She recovered herself, however, with an
effort worthy of her fall and was on her feet again as she stammeringly
spoke and angrily brushed at her eyes. "What difference in the world
does it make--what difference ever?" Then clearly, even with the words,
her checked tears suffered her to see how it made the difference that he
too had been crying; so that "I don't know why you mind!" she thereupon
wailed with extravagance.

"You don't know what I would have done for him. You don't know,
you don't know!" he repeated--while she looked as if she naturally
couldn't--as with a renewal of his dream of beneficence and of the
soreness of his personal wound.

"Well, but HE does you justice--he knows. So it shows, so it shows--!"

But in this direction too, unable to say what it showed, she had again
broken down and again could only hold herself and let her companion sit
there. "Ah Nanda, Nanda!" he deeply murmured; and the depth of the pity
was, vainly and blindly, as the depth of a reproach.

"It's I--it's I, therefore," she said as if she must then so look at it
with him; "it's I who am the horrible impossible and who have covered
everything else with my own impossibility. For some different person you
COULD have done what you speak of, and for some different person you can
do it still."

He stared at her with his barren sorrow. "A person different from him?"

"A person different from ME!"

"And what interest have I in any such person?"

"But your interest in me--you see w