always come now, you know," the thing he was there for seemed
already to have happened. He asked her if it was the death of her
aunt that made the difference; to which she replied: "She never
knew I knew you. I wished her not to." The beautiful clearness of
her candour--her faded beauty was like a summer twilight--
disconnected the words from any image of deceit. They might have
struck him as the record of a deep dissimulation; but she had
always given him a sense of noble reasons. The vanished aunt was
present, as he looked about him, in the small complacencies of the
room, the beaded velvet and the fluted moreen; and though, as we
know, he had the worship of the Dead, he found himself not
definitely regretting this lady. If she wasn't in his long list,
however, she was in her niece's short one, and Stransom presently
observed to the latter that now at least, in the place they haunted
together, she would have another object of devotion.

"Yes, I shall have another. She was very kind to me. It's that
that's the difference."

He judged, wondering a good deal before he made any motion to leave
her, that the difference would somehow be very great and would
consist of still other things than her having let him come in. It
rather chilled him, for they had been happy together as they were.
He extracted from her at any rate an intimation that she should now
have means less limited, that her aunt's tiny fortune had come to
her, so that there was henceforth only one to consume what had
formerly been made to suffice for two. This was a joy to Stransom,
because it had hitherto been equally impossible for him either to
offer her presents or contentedly to stay his hand. It was too
ugly to be at her side that way, abounding himself and yet not able