I

WAS eighteen months since Barry's death, and Edna was going through the last of his papers, because spring-cleaning would be here directly, and there was no use in hoarding rubbish.

Rubbish it was. All the papers of importance the business papers affecting her as a widow-had been dealt with long ago. These were just odds and ends out of the past: dance programs from the strangely remote days of their youth before the war; trivial forgotten notes; Christmas cards considered too pretty to throw away at the time, but pleading their demoded prettiness in vain now. They, and nearly everything else, went to feed the big bonfire in the grate, which took the chill off the room that had been Barry's study, and that nobody ever sat in nowexcept, occasionally, her sister Kathleen when she came in to consult some book.

The last drawer in Barry's writingtable was finished; methodically she drew out the soiled white sheet of lining-paper, and prepared to dust the empty drawer.

Not yet quite empty, however. A little square envelop that had slipped under the lining-paper revealed itself, and she took it out. Nothing was written on it, but there was some

thing inside: a slip of paper. She had just seen that it was nothing of importance-a brief reference to some passage in "Lear"-when the opening of the door interrupted her.

It was Kathleen who came in; and, at sight of Kathleen's face, looking startlingly ill, Edna forgot everything else.

She sprang up. "Kath! My dear! What is it?" She had her sister's swaying body in her arms now, and helped her into a chair.

"It's all-right," Kathleen gasped reassuringly, with that courage that never failed her. "But I thought I might be going to be rather ill, so I've come straight on here from the office, to save you the t-trouble of f-fetching me." She attempted her impudent grin, to comfort Edna. "D'you mind if I go to b-bed now? Sorry to be so uns-sociable."

She did not go to bed, however; she had to be carried there. Half an hour later the doctor had seen her; and, at his word "pneumonia," the luxurious house lost its air of being something beyond the reach of unpleasantness, and became a battle-ground in which life fought with death. A losing fight, however.

"Too plucky," said the doctor to Edna three days later, with a gesture half of professional vexation, half of

Edna felt her blood turn to water. "But you don't mean-?"

"There is hope," he said, "but-" He picked up his hat. "I'll be in again in a couple of hours."

21

Ten minutes later the nurse was out of the room, and Edna was alone with Kathleen. She stood staring down at the unconscious face that rested against the high-propped pillows. She knew now. She could not believe it yet, but she knew. At first her heart had leapt to that word "hope" on the doctor's lips; now she could hear only his "but." For "there is hope" had been just the drug of kindness; it was no more than the tail-end of that most desperate of proverbs, "While there's life there's hope." "Whereas the "but". was the doctor's own knowledge and experience: Kathleen was going to die.

She sat down by the bed. She knew something else too, now: under the stress of this agony she knew that with Kathleen, the last of her real life was going out of the world. Relatives, friends: they would be shadows, less than shadows now, with Kathleen not there. Only three people had really mattered to her, and Kathleen was the third of them. Now she, too, was going to become a memory—a memory differing only in one thing from the memory of those others: no remorse would be mixed with it. At least she had never injured Kathleen as, by her inveterate cowardice, she had injured the two men who had loved her.

First, Barry. (Her thoughts flowed swiftly, clearly, as though she herself were on the point of death.) Barry

what he thought was she. He had been misled, like thousands of men before him, into deducing the harmony of two spirits from the beauty of one face, and that look of dazzled awe in his eyes had been love. He had found out his mistake, of course. The look had changed, quite soon after their marriage, to puzzled wonder and then, for good and all, to courteous consideration, impenetrable reserve. If she had loved him, it might have been different; love might have given her the power to keep him. But she hadn't loved him, ever; she had liked him, both then and always, but she was not really his sort, not brainy enough; and she had married him only because he was a way of escape, because she was too cowardly to go on being a nursery governess any longer. Oh, why not think the truth, anyhow? She had married him for his money. Cowardly, cowardly: it was what she had always been—and Kathleen never— since they were turned out of the paradise of their childhood by the death of a father who had given them every good thing during his lifetime, and omitted to provide them with a penny of income after his death. But she and Kathleen were of different stuff: turned out, Kathleen had fought; she had shirked. And the first person to suffer by her shirking had been Barry. There had been no breach, nothing for any one to catch hold of; but, in silence and loneliness, he had suffered.

And then, if she had injured Barry, how much more had she injured Gerald, for that had been the denial of love itself.

No one had known or guessed

about Gerald: not even Barry, not even Kathleen. It was an absolute secret; she had sinned, and her sin had never found her out.

Four years after her marriage to Barry, she had loved Gerald, been loved by him, given herself for love. Yet, when it came to the point, she had let Gerald go and had stayed with Barry. Gerald stood for love but he stood, too, for poverty, risk, hardship. He might make good; but also he might not. Barry stood for comfort, ease, security-that paradise which she had lost once and dared not, dared not risk again! So Gerald had gone abroad alone; she had stayed, alone, with Barry. And Gerald had made good, and she had lost the best thing in life. And then, with the money that he had made, Gerald had gone to the dogs, had died. Her fault. Cowardice, cowardice For it wasn't as if she had stayed for Barry's sake; she had stayed for her own, and because she wanted the things that Barry gave her even more than Gerald, more than love.

Kathleen had never known that, either that she did not love Barry; for she would have been ashamed to tell her. Kathleen took it for granted that other people were as fine and strong and brave as she was herself; she would not have been able to conceive of her sister marrying except for love.

"Too plucky." Edna remembered the doctor's distressed, half-angry verdict. It was true. It was written on the thin white fine face against the pillows, so different from her own with its comfortable, well-preserved, characterless curves. Different from Kathleen-less in every

faculty of mind and soul she was! But at least Kathleen was dear to her and had never been hurt by her. She could always remember that.

22

Her breath caught as a strange, beautiful alteration came over that face against the raised pillows. The dark eyes opened and glowed; the lips were parted, curved to tenderness; ness; color pulsed, as in youth, through the thin cheeks. Suddenly Kathleen's arms were stretched out, and her body, already half upright against the pillows, leaned farther forward. And then-her head tilted upward, her eyes fixed in radiance on a point just in front of and above her face-she spoke.

"Darling!" she said on a note of slow, deep beauty.

For three seconds she maintained that position and that glowing rapture; then her arms dropped, her eyes shut, she sank back again.

Edna sat motionless with amazement. Just at first she had thought that Kathleen was speaking to her. But in the same breath she knew better. Kathleen had cared for her, but never had she seen that light in Kathleen's eyes, that curve on her lips. lips. She recognized the look, the smile: because she herself had loved Gerald, she recognized them. Only once in life, only for one man, was it permitted to a woman to look, smile, speak like that.

Kathleen had loved some one, then

Strange how all these years, keeping her own secret about Gerald, it had never occurred to her that Kathleen might be keeping some secret, too. Love? And Kathleen? She had seemed remote from all

that; too calm, cool, critical, as well as absorbed in her work-the literary agency that she had built up.

Who could it have been? Some one connected with that work, some writer? Or some one long ago, during those two years of Kathleen's abroad, when they had been parted? Perhaps some one met on a holiday, or"Any change?" The nurse, hurrying in with extra briskness because of her consciousness of having gossiped too long downstairs, asked the question.

Edna turned. A fierce loyalty thrilled through her. Though she did not know what Kathleen's secret was, at least she could keep it for her, now that she was helpless to keep it for herself. "None," she said.

She did not mean to think ever again of Kathleen's one betraying word. It was unfair, indecent to probe further into a secret so unconsciously endangered. And what could it matter, now that Kathleen was dead?

Yet she had to think of it. On the very evening after the funeral she was incapable of keeping her thoughts off it. For two convictions had somehow been born of that one word: first that, for some reason, it was imperative that she should know; and, second-teasingly elusive, this onethat the means to find out lay somehow ready to her hand, if she could only think where, remember how.

She sat now, after her solitary dinner, thinking. But the second conviction, at any rate, she argued, was surely ridiculous? No one could have been taken more stunningly by surprise than she had been by the implications of that last word that

Kathleen had ever spoken; how, then, could she have forgotten any evidence bearing on the mattersince she had certainly never possessed any evidence? No, that was absurd.

But, as to who the man might have been? Surely by now she had thought of-and dismissed as impossible every one? There was only one thing of which she could be sure: the man, whoever he was, was no longer alive. Everything about that strange moment, that last word, convinced her of it. Kathleen had spoken to some one, seen or heard some one; spirit had met with spirit. But the meeting had been so unfaltering only because one of the two was already free of the flesh, the other almost so. She was sure, utterly sure of that-though there were no words in which to express the amazing certainty that Kathleen had left behind for her: certainty of the deathlessness of the spirit.

Who had the man been, who? And why did it seem to matter like this? It could not have been Gerald? No, of course not; Gerald and Kathleen had barely met: she had seen to that, for the sake of her own secret.

Well, then, it must have been some one during those two young years abroad! She recalled Kathleen's homecoming and at once that theory, too, was ridiculous. Kathleen eager, high-spirited, overjoyed to be back in England? Why, if that Kathleen was in love with somebody left behind in Austria, she was the most consummate actress ever born!

No, no, it could not have been then. Kathleen had been heart-free then. It must have been later. What had happened next?

Why, to begin with, Kathleen had taken that long holiday, staying with her and Barry both in London and in the country; it must have lasted at least six months, and she had done her best to get Kathleen to extend it indefinitely. But Kathleen had always had the devil's own pride; she had insisted that she must earn her living. So she had embarked on the work that led up to the literary agency, and had slaved to such an extent that for a time it had been difficult to get hold of her at all.

Yet during that year it might have happened, perhaps; for her own hands had been pretty full with Barry and that nervous breakdown he had, so that they had to travel for months on end, and nothing pleased him or did him any good. At last he had announced that England was his only cure, and they had come back, and it had proved so. At any rate, he worked harder than ever after that, and was never really ill again. She remembered thinking Kathleen older and quieter when they returned to London, but she had put it down to her work. And besides, soon after that she herself had met Gerald, and so had not much thought to spare for any one else. Afterwards—after Gerald had gone and she was sick with her secret misery-Kathleen had been an angel to her. She had allowed herself to be rung up on any evening when solitude threatened, and the arrangement begun then had lasted more or less unchanged to the end: Kathleen could be depended on to come whenever she was alone.

Whenever she was- What was the warning throb communicated by that phrase, the tingling expectancy? -a sensation like that experienced in

friends during those first months, and with so much in common: books, games, politics. And then Kathleen's going, Barry's breakdown; and, afterwards, she and Kathleen almost always alone, Barry never there, or hardly ever. And, when he was there, only the most casual commonplaces passing between him and Kathleen. Nothing to say to each other: they, who had been always laughing and arguing when Kathleen first came home

But then-but then that wasn't love! Even if it had once been love, they must have quarreled, tired at the end of those first six months. They could never have gone through the years like that, still loving

Couldn't they? Hadn't they? Barry had never been ill again, but also he had never recovered what he lost during that breakdown, for it was youth. And Kathleen? She had lost something, too, forever: not courage, but hope. How easy to see it all now!-once there was a clue.

And yet-oh, no! She wouldn't believe it; there was no need to torture herself with believing it. As if one could build up a whole edifice, like this, from one word!-Kathleen's unconscious word "Darling." No; she was in an excited, overwrought condition after losing Kathleen, and a prey to any nightmare of the