he saw it now, the thing they all had seen, that she only could
not see.

She had sinned the sin of sins, the sin of youth in middle-age.

Now it was not imagination in Miss Quincey, so much as the tradition of
St. Sidwell's, that gave her innocent affection the proportions of a
crime. Miss Quincey had lived all her life in ignorance of her own
nature, having spent the best part of five-and-forty years in acquiring
other knowledge. She had nothing to go upon, for she had never been
young; or rather she had treated her youth unkindly, she had fed it on
saw-dust and given it nothing but arithmetic books to play with, so that
its experiences were of no earthly use to her.

And now, if they had only let her alone, she might have been none the
wiser; her folly might have put on many quaint disguises, friendship,
literary sympathy, intellectual esteem--there were a thousand delicate
subterfuges and innocent hypocrisies, and under any one of them it might
have crept about unchallenged in the shadows and blind alleys of thought.
As love pure and simple, if it came to that, there was no harm in it.
Many an old maid, older than she, has just such a secret folded up and
put away all sweet and pure; the poor lady does not call it love, but
remembrance, which is so to speak love laid in lavender; and she--who
knows? She might have contrived a little shrine for it somewhere; she had
always understood that love was a holy thing.

Unfortunately, when a holy thing has been pulled about and dragged in the
mud, it may be as holy as ever but it will never look the same. In Miss
Quincey's case mortal passion had been shaken out of its sleep and forced
to look at itself before it had time to put on a shred of immortality. In
the sudden glare it stood out monstrous, naked and ashamed; she herself
had helped to deprive it of all the delicacies and amenities that made it
tolerable to thought. With her own hands she had delivered it up to the
stethoscope.

He knew, he knew. In the mad rush of her ideas one sentence detached
itself from the torrent. "_He_ knows well enough what's the matter with
you."

The nature of the crime was such that there was no possibility or
explanation or defence against the accuser whose condemnation weighed
heaviest on her soul. He loomed before her, hovered over her, with the
tubes of the heart-probing stethoscope in his ears (as a matter of fact
they gave him a somewhat grotesque appearance, remotely suggestiv