“I think I do.  I wish I had never heard of you.  I wish he had never seen you.  I hope you will never come again.  I haven’t looked at your poems that he praises so.  He says they are beautiful.  Very well, I shall hate them because they are beautiful.  He says they have more life in them than his.  Do you understand now why I hate them and you?  He was young before you came here.  You have made him feel that he is old, that he must die.  I don’t know what else he said to you.  Shall I tell you what he said to me?  He said that the world will forget him when it’s listening to you.”

“You misunderstood him.”  He thought that he understood her; but it puzzled him that, adoring Fielding as she did, she yet permitted herself to doubt.

“Do you suppose I thought that he grudged you your fame?  Because he doesn’t.  But I do.”

“You needn’t.  At present it only exists in his imagination.”

“That’s enough.  If it exists there—­”

“You mean, it will go down the ages?”

She nodded.

“And you don’t want it to go?”

“Not unless his goes too, and goes farther.”

“You need hardly be afraid.”

“I’m not afraid.  Only, he has always stood alone, so high that no one has touched him.  I’ve always seen him that way, all my life—­and I can’t bear to see him any other way.  I can’t bear any one to touch him, or even to come anywhere near him.”

“No one ever will touch him.  Whoever comes after him, he will always stand alone.  And,” he added gently, “you will always see him so.”

“Yes,” she said, but in a voice that told him she was still unconsoled.  “If I had seen him when he was young, I suppose I should always see him young.  Not that I care about that so much.  His youth is the part of him that interests me least; perhaps because it was never in any way a part of me.”

He looked at her.  Did she realize how far Fielding’s youth, if report spoke truly, had belonged to, or in her own words, “been a part of” other women?  Did she resent their part in him?  He thought not.  It was not so much that she was jealous of Fielding’s youth, as that she shrank from any appearance of disloyalty to his age.

“And yet,” she said, “I feel that no one has a right to be young when he is old.  I hate young poets because they are young.  I hate my own youth—­”

Her youth?  Yes, it was youth that leapt quivering in her tragic face, like a blown flame.  Her body hardly counted except as fuel to the eager and incessant fire.

“Don’t hate it,” he said.  “It is the most beautiful thing you have to give him.”

“Ah—­if I could give it him!”

He smiled.  “You have given it him.  He isn’t old when he can inspire such devotion.  He is to be envied.”

He rose and held out his hand.  As she took it, Miss Gurney’s flame-like gaze rested on him a moment and grew soft.