Far back in the chair and favoured by Rhoda's silence, Miss Quincey
dropped into a dream. Presently she woke up as it were with a start.

"What am I thinking of? Let us be reasonable; let us reduce it to
figures. Forty-five--thirty--he is thirty. Take twenty-five from thirty
and five remain. Why, Rhoda, he would have been--"

They looked at each other, but neither said: "He would have been five
years old."

Miss Quincey seemed quite prostrated by the result of her calculations.
To everything that Rhoda could urge to soothe her she answered steadily:

"You do not know him as I do."

The voice was not Miss Quincey's voice; it was the monotonous, melancholy
voice of the Fixed Idea.

Her knowledge of him. After all, nothing could take from her the
exquisite privacy of that possession.

* * * * *

"_Eros anikate machan_," said Rhoda.

Miss Quincey was gone and the Classical Mistress was in school again,
coaching a backward student through the "Antigone."

"Oh Love, unconquered in fight. Love who--Love who fliest, who fliest
about among things," said the student. And the teacher laughed.