“No.  You would never have known.”

“I think I should have been glad, even if the poems had been—­not very good poems.”

“You wouldn’t have known in that case either.  I wouldn’t have shown them to you if they had not been good.  As it is, when I wrote them I never meant to show them to you.”

“Oh, but I think—­”

“Of course you do.  But I wasn’t going to print them before you’d seen them.  Do you know what I’d meant to do with them—­what in fact I did do with them?  I left them to you in my will with directions that they weren’t to be published without your consent.  It seems a rather unusual bequest, but you know I had a conceited hope that some time they might be valuable.  I don’t know whether they would have sold for three thousand pounds—­I admit it was a draft on posterity that posterity might have dishonoured—­but I thought they might possibly go a little way towards paying my debt.”

“Your debt?  I don’t understand.”  But the trembling of her mouth belied its words.

“Don’t you?  Don’t you remember?”

“No, I don’t.  I never have remembered.”

“Probably not.  But you can hardly suppose that I’ve forgotten it.”

“What has it to do with you, or me—­or this?”

“Not much, perhaps; but still something, you’ll admit.”

“I admit nothing.  I can’t bear your ever having thought of it.  I wish you hadn’t told me.  It spoils everything.”

“Does it?  Such a little thing?  Surely a friend might be allowed to leave you a small legacy when he was decently dead?  And it wasn’t his fault, was it, if it paid a debt as well?”

The tears rose in her eyes to answer him.

“But you see I didn’t leave it.  I didn’t wait for that.  I was afraid that my being dead would put you in a more embarrassing position than if I’d been alive.  You might have hated those poems and yet you might have shrunk from suppressing them for fear of wounding the immortal vanity of a blessed spirit.  Or you might have taken that horrid literary view I implored you not to take.  You might have hesitated to inflict so great a loss on the literature of your country.”  He tried to speak lightly, as if it were merely a whimsical and extravagant notion that he should be reckoned among the poets.  And yet in his heart he knew that it must be so.  “But now the things can’t be published unless you will accept them as they were originally meant.  There’s nothing gross about the transaction; nothing that need offend either you or me.”

“I can’t—­I can’t—­”

“Well,” he said gently, fearing the appearance of grossness in pressing the question, “we can settle that afterwards, can’t we?  Meanwhile at all events the publication rests with you.”

“The publication has nothing whatever to do with me—­The dedication, perhaps.”

“You’ve accepted that.  Still, you might object to your name appearing before the public with mine.”