ell of lavender," Olivia gasped, weakly. "I never could
endure it. I'll just run into the air a minute--"

This was all that passed between Olivia and Mrs. Temple on the subject.
If the latter reported it with suppressions and amplifications it was
doubtless due to her knowledge of what could be omitted as well as of
what would have been said had the topic been pursued. In any case it
caused her to sigh and mumble as she went on with her task of folding
and unfolding and of examining textures and designs:

"Oh, how mixy! Such sixes and sevens! Everything the wrong way round! My
poor Drusilla!--my poor little girlie! And such a good position! Just
what she's capable of filling!--as well as Olivia--better, with all her
experience of their army. ''Tis better to have loved and lost,' dear
Tennyson says; but I don't know. Besides, she's done that already--with
poor Gerald--and now, to have to face it all a second time--my poor
little girlie!"

As for Olivia, she felt an overpowering desire to flee away. Speeding
through the house, where workmen were nailing up cases or sacking rugs,
she felt that she was fleeing--fleeing anywhere--anywhere--to hide
herself. As a matter of fact, the flight was inward, for there was
nowhere to go but to her room. Her way was down the short staircase from
the attic and along a hall; but it seemed to her that she lived through
a succession of emotional stages in the two or three minutes it took to
cover it. Her first wild cry "It isn't true! It isn't true!" was
followed by the question "Why shouldn't it be true?" to end with her
asking herself: "What difference does it make to me?"

"What difference _can_ it make to me?"

She had reached that form of the query by the time she took up her
station at the window of her room, to stare blankly at the November
landscape. She saw herself face to face now with the question which,
during the past month, ever since Davenant's sudden disappearance, she
had used all her resources to evade. That it would one day force itself
upon her she knew well enough; but she hoped, too, that before there was
time for that she would have pronounced her marriage vows, and so burned
her bridges behind her. Amid the requirements of duty, which seemed to
shift from week to week, the one thing stable was the necessity on her
part to keep her promise to the man who had stood by her so nobly. If
once it had seemed to her that Davenant's demands--whatever they might
prove t