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“Well, I am a cat!” Cornelia grinned.

“Do you mean you can tell me things–?” It was too beautiful to believe.

“About what really was?” she artfully considered, holding him immensely now. “Well, unless they’ve come to you with time; unless you’ve learned–or found out.”

“Oh,” he reassuringly cried–reassuringly, it most seemed, for himself–“nothing has come to me with time, everything has gone from me. How can I find out now! What creature has an idea—-?”

She threw up her hands with the shrug of old days–the sharp little shrug his sisters used to imitate and that she hadn’t had to go to Europe for. The only thing was that he blessed her for bringing it back.

“Ah, the ideas of people now—-!”

“Yes, their ideas are certainly not about us” But he ruefully faced it. “We’ve none the less, however, to live with them.”

“With their ideas–?” Cornelia questioned.

“With them–these modern wonders; such as they are!” Then he went on: “It must have been to help me you’ve come back.”

She said nothing for an instant about that, only nodding instead at his photograph. “What has become of yours? I mean of her.”

This time it made him turn pale. “You remember I have one?”

She kept her eyes on him. “In a ‘pork-pie’ hat, with her hair in a long net. That was so ‘smart’ then; especially with one’s skirt looped up, over one’s hooped magenta petticoat, in little festoons, and a row of very big onyx beads over one’s braided velveteen sack–braided quite plain and very broad, don’t you know?”

He smiled for her extraordinary possession of these things–she was as prompt as if she had had them before her. “Oh, rather–‘don’t I know?’ You wore brown velveteen, and, on those remarkably small hands, funny gauntlets–like mine.”

“Oh, do you remember? But like yours?” she wondered.

“I mean like hers in my photograph.” But he came back to the present picture. “This is better, however, for really showing her lovely head.”

“Mary’s head was a perfection!” Cornelia testified.

“Yes–it was better than her heart.”

“Ah, don’t say that!” she pleaded. “You weren’t fair.”

“Don’t you think I was fair?” It interested him immensely–and the more that he indeed mightn’t have been; which he seemed somehow almost to hope.

“She didn’t think so–to the very end.”

“She didn’t?”–ah the right things Cornelia said to him! But before she could answer he was studying again closely the small faded face. “No, she doesn’t, she doesn’t. Oh, her charming sad eyes and the way they say that, across the years, straight into mine! But I don’t know, I don’t know!” White-Mason quite comfortably sighed.

His companion appeared to appreciate this effect. “That’s just the way you used to flirt with her, poor thing. Wouldn’t you like to have it?” she asked.

“This–for my very own?” He looked up delighted. “I really may?”

“Well, if you’ll give me yours. We’ll exchange.”

“That’s a charming idea. We’ll exchange. But you must come and get it at my rooms–where you’ll see my things.”

For a little she made no answer–as if for some feeling. Then she said: “You asked me just now why I’ve come back.”

He stared as for the connection; after which with a smile: “Not to do that—-?”

She waited briefly again, but with a queer little look. “I can do those things now; and–yes!–that’s in a manner why. I came,” she then said, “because I knew of a sudden one day–knew as never before–that I was old.”

“I see. I see.” He quite understood–she had notes that so struck him. “And how did you like it?”

She hesitated–she decided. “Well, if I liked it, it was on the principle perhaps on which some people like high game!”

“High game–that’s good!” he laughed. “Ah, my dear, we’re ‘high’!”

She shook her head. “No, not you–yet. I at any rate didn’t want any more adventures,” Cornelia said.

He showed their small relic again with assurance. “You wanted us. Then here we are. Oh how we can talk!–with all those things you know! You are an invention. And you’ll see there are things J know. I shall turn up here–well, daily.”

She took it in, but only after a moment answered. “There was something you said just now you’d tell me. Don’t you mean to try—-?”

“Mrs. Worthingham?” He drew from within his coat his pocket-book and carefully found a place in it for Mary Cardew’s carte-de-visite, folding it together with deliberation over which he put it back. Finally he spoke. “No–I’ve decided. I can’t–I don’t want to.”

Cornelia marvelled–or looked as if she did. “Not for all she has?”

“Yes–I know all she has. But I also know all she hasn’t. And, as I told you, she herself doesn’t–hasn’t a glimmer of a suspicion of it; and never will have.”

Cornelia magnanimously thought “No–but she knows other things.”

He shook his head as at the portentous heap of them. “Too many–too many. And other indeed–so other! Do you know,” he went on, “that it’s as if you–by turning up for me–had brought that home to me?”

“‘For you,'” she candidly considered. “But what–since you can’t marry me!–can you do with me?”

Well, he seemed to have it all. “Everything. I can live with you–just this way.” To illustrate which he dropped into the other chair by her fire; where, leaning back, he gazed at the flame. “I can’t give you up. It’s very curious. It has come over me as it did over you when you renounced Bognor. That’s it–I know it at last, and I see one can like it. I’m ‘high.’ You needn’t deny it. That’s my taste. I’m old.” And in spite of the considerable glow there of her little household altar he said it without the scowl.