Andora stood beside her, watching too.  “Have you any idea where that bag came from, Lizzie?”

Mrs. Deering, bent above a pile of dis-collared shirts, shook an inattentive head.  “I never saw such wicked washing!  There isn’t one that’s fit to mend.  The bag?  No; I’ve not the least idea.”

Andora surveyed her dramatically.  “Doesn’t it make you utterly miserable to think that some woman may have made it for him?”

Lizzie, bowed in anxious scrutiny above the shirts, broke into an unruffled laugh.  “Really, Andora, really—­six, seven, nine; no, there isn’t even a dozen.  There isn’t a whole dozen of anything.  I don’t see how men live alone!”

Andora broodingly pursued her theme.  “Do you mean to tell me it doesn’t make you jealous to handle these things of his that other women may have given him?”

Lizzie shook her head again, and, straightening herself with a smile, tossed a bundle in her friend’s direction.  “No, it doesn’t make me the least bit jealous.  Here, count these socks for me, like a darling.”

Andora moaned, “Don’t you feel anything at all?” asthe socks landed in her hollow bosom; but Lizzie, intent upon her task, tranquilly continued to unfold and sort.  She felt a great deal as she did so, but her feelings were too deep and delicate for the simplifying process of speech.  She only knew that each article she drew from the trunks sent through her the long tremor of Deering’s touch.  It was part of her wonderful new life that everything belonging to him contained an infinitesimal fraction of himself—­a fraction becoming visible in the warmth of her love as certain secret elements become visible in rare intensities of temperature.  And in the case of the objects before her, poor shabby witnesses of his days of failure, what they gave out acquired a special poignancy from its contrast to his present cherished state.  His shirts were all in round dozens now, and washed as carefully as old lace.  As for his socks, she knew the pattern of every pair, and would have liked to see the washerwoman who dared to mislay one, or bring it home with the colors “run”!  And in these homely tokens of his well-being she saw the symbol of what her tenderness had brought him.  He was safe in it, encompassed by it, morally and materially, and she defied the embattled powers of malice to reach him through the armor of her love.  Such feelings, however, were not communicable, even had one desired to express them:  they wereno more to be distinguished from the sense of life itself than bees from the lime-blossoms in which they murmur.

“Oh, do look at him, Lizzie!  He’s found out how toopen the bag!”

Lizzie lifted her head to smile a moment at her son, who satthroned on a heap of studio rubbish, with Andora before him on adoring knees.  She thought vaguely, “Poor Andora!” and then resumed the discouraged inspection of a buttonless white waistcoat.  The next sound she was aware of was a fluttered exclamation from her friend.