“And yet you’ve been making catalogues for years, haven’t you?”

Lucia had said to herself, “It’s that catalogue raisonne, I know.”

“Do you like making catalogues?”

“Well, under ordinary circumstances it isn’t exactly what you’d call exciting.  But I’m afraid that hasn’t got anything to do with it this time.”

“It may have everything to do with it—­such a dreadful kind of work.”

“No.  It isn’t the work that’s dreadful.”

“Then perhaps it’s the worry?  And I’m afraid I’m responsible for that.”

He started, shaken out of his admirable self-possession by that glaring personality.  “How could you be?”

“By insisting on engaging you as I did.  From what you told me it’s very evident that you had something on your mind, and that the work has been very dreadful, very difficult.”

“I have something on my mind and—­it has been difficult—­all the same—­”

“I wouldn’t have pressed you if I had really known.  I’m very sorry.  Is it too late?  Would it be any good if I released you now?”

If she released him!

“Miss Harden, you are most awfully good to me.”

“Would that help you?”

He looked at her.  Over her face there ran again that little ripple of thought and sympathy, like shadow and flame.  One fear was removed from him.  Whatever happened Miss Harden would never misunderstand him.  At the same time he realized that any prospect, however calamitous, would be more endurable than the course she now proposed.

“It wouldn’t help me.  The best thing I can do is to stay where I am and finish.”

“Is that the truth?”

“Nothing but the truth.”

("But not the whole truth,” thought Lucia.)

“Well,” she said, rising, “whatever you do, don’t lose heart.”

He smiled drearily.  It was all very well to say that, when his heart was lost already.

“Wait—­wait till next spring comes.”

He could put what meaning he liked into that graceful little commonplace.  But it dismissed at the same time that it reassured him.  The very ease and delicacy with which it was done left him no doubt on that point.

He was not going to accept his dismissal then and there.  A bold thought leapt in his brain.  Could he—­might he—?  She had read his sonnet; would it do to ask her to read his drama also?  To be sure the sonnet had but fourteen lines, while the drama had twice as many hundred.  But the drama, the drama, his beautiful Helen in Leuce, was his ultimate achievement, the highest, completest expression of his soul.  And what he required of Lucia Harden was not her praise, but fuller, more perfect comprehension.  He stood in a cruel and false position, and he longed for her to know the finest and the best of him, before she knew (as she must know) the worst.

She was turning away; but there was a closed gate between her and the hill-path that led down into the valley.