Miriam flushed, and for an instant he thought he had offended her.  But her reply corrected this impression.

“You admitted, I think, that there was much to be said for my view.”

“Did I?  Well, so there is.  But the same conviction may be reached by very different paths.  If we agreed in that one result, I fancy it was the sole and singular point of concord.”

Miriam inquired diffidently: 

“Do you still think of most things just as you did then?”

“Of most things, yes.”

“You have found no firmer hope in which to work?”

“Hope?  I am not sure that I understand you.”

He looked her in the face, and she said hurriedly: 

“Are you still as far as ever from satisfying yourself?  Does your work bring you nothing but a comparative satisfaction?”

“I am conscious of having progressed an inch or two on the way of infinity,” Mallard replied.  “That brings me no nearer to an end.”

“But you have a purpose; you follow it steadily.  It is much to be able to say that.”

“Do you mean it for consolation?”

“Not in any sense that you need resent,” Miriam gave answer, a little coldly.

“I felt no resentment.  But I should like to know what sanction of a life’s effort you look for, now?  We talked once, perhaps you remember, of one kind of work being ‘higher’ than another.  How do you think now on that subject?”

She made delay before saying: 

“It is long since I thought of it at all.  I have been too busy learning the simplest things to trouble about the most difficult.”

“To learn, then, has been your object all this time.  Let me question you in turn.  Do you find it all-sufficient?”

“No; because I have begun too late.  I am doing now what I ought to have done when I was a girl, and I have always the feeling of being behindhand.”

“But the object, in itself, quite apart from your progress?  Is it enough to study a variety of things, and feel that you make some progress towards a possible ideal of education?  Does this suffice to your life?”

She answered confusedly: 

“I can’t know yet; I can’t see before me clearly enough.”

Mallard was on the point of pressing the question, but he refrained, and shaped his thought in a different way.

“Do you think of remaining in England?”

“Probably I shall.”

“You will return to your home in Lancashire?”

“I haven’t yet determined,” she replied formally.

The dialogue seemed to be at an end.  Unobservant of each other, they reached the Via Crucis, which leads up to S. Pietro in Montorio.  Arrived at the terrace, they stood to look down on Rome.

“After all, you are tired,” said Mallard, when he had glanced at her.

“Indeed I am not.”

“But you are hungry.  We have been forgetting that it is luncheon-time.”