you been reading?--"

"Oh, I have been reading nothing! You shall never go into retreat
again," she went on, with a sudden change of expression. "It is well
enough for you, but I am not good at fasting. And I have an indulgence,"
she added, unaware of her soft, bright audacity, "that will cover both
our cases."

His face uttered aloud his reflection that she was extravagant. That
it was a pity, but that what was not due to her profession might
be ascribed to the simple, clear impulse of her temperament--that
temperament which he had found to be a well of rare sincerity.

"I am not to go any more into retreat?" he said, in grave interrogation;
but the hint of rebuke in his voice was not in his heart, and she knew
it.

"No!" she cried. "You shall not be hidden away like that. You shall not
go alive into the tomb and leave me at the door. Because I cannot bear
it."

She leaned toward him, and her hand fell lightly on his knee. It was a
claiming touch, and there was something in the unfolded sweetness of her
face that was not ambiguous. Arnold received the intelligence. It came
in a vague grey monitory form, a cloud, a portent, a chill menace;
but it came, and he paled under it. He seemed to lean upon his hands,
pressed one on each side of him to the seat of the sofa for support, and
he looked in fixed silence at hers, upon his knee. His face seemed to
wither, new lines came upon it as the impression grew in him; and the
glamour faded out of hers as she was sharply reminded, looking at him,
that he had not traversed the waste with her, that she had kept her
vigils alone. Yet it was all said and done, and there was no repentance
in her. She only gathered herself together, and fell back, as it were,
upon her magnificent position. As she drew her hand away, he dropped his
face into the cover of his own, leaning his elbow on his knee, and there
was a pulsing silence. The instant prolonged itself.

"Are you praying?" Hilda asked, with much gentleness, almost a childlike
note; and he shook his head. There was another, instant's pause, and she
spoke again.

"Are you so grieved, then," she said, "that this has come upon us?"

Again he held his eyes away from her, clasping his hands, and looking
at the thing nearest to him, while at last blood from the heart of the
natural man in him came up and stained his face, his forehead under the
thin ruffling of colourless hair, his neck above the white band that was
his badge of d