aned back in the little armchair; she wore a grey dressing-gown,
and her long hair was combed out and hung to the ground. Em, sitting
before her, looked up with mingled respect and admiration.

Lyndall was tired after her long journey, and had come to her room
early. Her eyes ran over the familiar objects. Strange to go away for
four years, and come back, and find that the candle standing on the
dressing-table still cast the shadow of an old crone's head in the
corner beyond the clothes-horse. Strange that even a shadow should last
longer than a man! She looked about among the old familiar objects; all
was there, but the old self was gone.

"What are you noticing?" asked Em.

"Nothing and everything. I thought the windows were higher. If I were
you, when I get this place I should raise the walls. There is not room
to breathe here. One suffocates."

"Gregory is going to make many alterations," said Em; and drawing nearer
to the grey dressing-gown respectfully. "Do you like him, Lyndall? Is he
not handsome?"

"He must have been a fine baby," said Lyndall, looking at the white
dimity curtain that hung above the window.

Em was puzzled.

"There are some men," said Lyndall, "whom you never can believe were
babies at all; and others you never see without thinking how very nice
they must have looked when they wore socks and pink sashes."

Em remained silent; then she said with a little dignity, "When you know
him you will love him as I do. When I compare other people with him,
they seem so weak and little. Our hearts are so cold, our loves are
mixed up with so many other things. But he--no one is worthy of his
love. I am not. It is so great and pure."

"You need not make yourself unhappy on that point--your poor return for
his love, my dear," said Lyndall. "A man's love is a fire of olive-wood.
It leaps higher every moment; it roars, it blazes, it shoots out red
flames; it threatens to wrap you round and devour you--you who stand by
like an icicle in the glow of its fierce warmth. You are self-reproached
at your own chilliness and want of reciprocity. The next day, when you
go to warm your hands a little, you find a few ashes! 'Tis a long love
and cool against a short love and hot; men, at all events, have nothing
to complain of."

"You speak so because you do not know men," said Em, instantly assuming
the dignity of superior knowledge so universally affected by affianced
and married women in discussing man's natur