“But—­deliberately—­to go so far!  I couldn’t, I couldn’t, even if I could.”

Hilda leaned back in her corner with her arms extended along the back and the end of the sofa.  Her hands drooped in their vigour, her knees were crossed, and her skirts draped them in long simple lines.  In her symmetry and strength and the warm cloud of her hair and the soul that sat behind the shadows of her eyes Vedder might have drawn her as a tragic symbol for the poet who sang what he sometimes thought of wine and death and roses.

“I would go farther,” she said, and looked as if some other thing charged with sweetness had come before her.

“And even if one gained, one would never trust one’s success,” Alicia faltered.

“Ah, if one gained one would hold,” Hilda said; and while she smiled on her pupil in the arts of life, the tenderness grew in her eyes and came upon her lips.  Her thought turned inward absently; it embraced with sweet irony, a picture of poverty, chastity, obedience.  As if she knew her betrayal already complete, “I wish I had such a chance,” she said.

“You wish you had such a chance!”

“I didn’t mean to tell you—­you have enough to do to work out your own problem; but—­”

She seemed to find a joy in hesitating, to keep back the words as a miser might keep back gold.  She let her secret escape through her eyes instead.  She was deliberately radiant and silent.  Alicia looked at her as they might have looked, across the desert, at a mirage of the Promised Land.

“Then after all he has prevailed,” she said.

“Who?”

“Hamilton Bradley.”

Hilda laughed—­the laugh was full and light and spontaneous, as if all the training of the notes of her throat came unconsciously to make it beautiful.

“How you will hold me to my metier,” she said.  “Hamilton Bradley has given up trying.”

“Then—­”

“Then think!  Be clever.  Be very clever.”

Alicia dropped her head in the joined length of her hands.  A turquoise on one of them made them whiter, more transparent than usual.  Presently she drew her face up from her clinging fingers and searched the other woman with eyes that nevertheless refused confirmation for their astonishment.

“Well?” said Hilda.

“I can think of no one—­there is no one—­except—­oh, it’s too absurd!  Not Stephen—­poor dear Stephen!”

The faintest shadow drifted across Hilda’s face, as if for an instant she contemplated a thing inscrutable.  Then the light came back, dashed with a gravity, a gentleness.

“I admit the absurdity.  Stephen—­poor dear Stephen.  How odd it seems,” she went on, while Alicia gazed, “the announcement of it—­ like a thing born.  But it is that—­a thing born.”

“I don’t understand—­in the least,” Alicia exclaimed.

“Neither do I. I don’t indeed.  Sometimes I feel like a creature with its feet in a trap.  The insane, insane improbability of it!” She laughed again.  It was delicious to hear her.