“Advances?  Rather not.  But if I thought he was thinking things—­he isn’t, you know, he’s not that sort; still, if I thought it I should have it out with him.”

“How could you have it—­’out with him’?”

“Oh I should just ask him what he thought of me; or better still, tell him what I thought of him.”

Miss Quincey shrank visibly from the bold suggestion.

“Would you?  Oh, that would never do.  You won’t mind my saying so, but I think it would look a little indelicate.  Of course it would be very different if it were a woman; if it were you for instance.”

“I should do it any way.  It’s the straightest thing.”

“I daresay, dear, in your friendships it is.  But I think you can hardly judge of this.  You do not know Dr. Cautley as I do.”

“No,” said Rhoda meekly, “perhaps I don’t.”  Not for worlds would she have destroyed that beautiful illusion.

“It has been,” continued Miss Quincey, “a very peculiar, a very interesting relationship.  Strange too—­considering.  If you had asked me six months ago I should have told you that the thing was impossible, or rather, that in nine cases out of ten—­I mean I should have said it was highly improbable that Dr. Cautley would take the faintest interest in me, let alone like me.”

“He does like you, dear Miss Quincey, I know he does.”

“How do you know?”

“He told me so.” (Miss Quincey quivered and a faint flush worked up through the sallow of her cheek.) “And I’m sure he would be most distressed to think you were unhappy.”

“It is not unhappiness; certainly not unhappiness.  On the contrary I have been happy, quite happy lately.  And I think it has been bad for me.  I wasn’t used to it.  Perhaps, if it had happened five-and-twenty years ago—­Do not misunderstand me, I am merely speaking of friendship, dear; but it might—­I mean I might—­”

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.”