And then—­and then—­how differently it had all turned out!  Perhaps it wouldn’t have, if she hadn’t been such a goose—­she who so seldom cried, so prided herself on a stoic control of her little twittering cageful of “feelings.”  But if she had cried, it was because he had looked at her so kindly, so softly, and because she had nevertheless felt him so pained and shamed by what she said.  The pain, of course, lay for both in the implication behind her words—­in the one word they left unspoken.  If little Juliet was as she was, it was because of the mother up-stairs—­the mother who had given her child her futile impulses, and grudged her the care that might have guided them.  The wretched case so obviously revolved in its own vicious circle that when Mr. Deering had murmured, “Of course if my wife were not an invalid,” they both turned with a simultaneous spring to the flagrant “bad example” of Celeste and Suzanne, fastening on that with a mutual insistence that ended inhis crying out, “All the more, then, how can you leave her to them?”

“But if I do her no good?” Lizzie wailed; and it was then that,—­when he took her hand and assured her gently, “But you do, you do!”—­it was then that, in the traditional phrase, she “brokedown,” and her conventional protest quivered off into tears.

“You do me good, at any rate—­you make the houseseem less like a desert,” she heard him say; and the next moment she felt herself drawn to him, and they kissed each other through her weeping.

They kissed each other—­there was the new fact.  One does not, if one is a poor little teacher living in Mme. Clopin’s Pension Suisse at Passy, and if one has pretty brown hair and eyes that reach out trustfully to other eyes—­one does not, under these common but defenseless conditions, arrive at the age of twenty-five without being now and then kissed,—­waylaid once by a noisy student between two doors, surprised once by one’s gray-bearded professoras one bent over the “theme” he was correcting,—­but these episodes, if they tarnish the surface, do not reach the heart:  itis not the kiss endured, but the kiss returned, that lives.  And Lizzie West’s first kiss was for Vincent Deering.

As she drew back from it, something new awoke in her—­something deeper than the fright and the shame, and the penitent thought of Mrs. Deering.  A sleeping germ of life thrilled and unfolded, and started out blindly to seek the sun.

She might have felt differently, perhaps,—­the shame and penitence might have prevailed,—­had she not known him so kind and tender, and guessed him so baffled, poor, and disappointed.  She knew the failure of his married life, and she divined a corresponding failure in his artistic career.  Lizzie, who had made her own faltering snatch at the same laurels, brought her thwarted proficiency to bear on the question of his pictures, which she judged to be extremely brilliant, but suspected of having