“Kitty,” she said again, “I want you to promise me something.  Supposing—­it’s very unlikely—­but supposing after all I were to go and die—­”

“I won’t suppose anything of the sort.  People don’t go and die of nervous exhaustion.  You’ll probably do it fifty years hence, but that is just the reason why I won’t have you harrowing my feelings this way now.”

“I know I’ve had such piles of sympathy for my nervous exhaustion that it’s horrid of me to try and get more for dying, too.  I only meant if I did do it, quite unexpectedly, of something else—­you wouldn’t tell him, would you?”

“Well, dear, of course I won’t mention it if you wish me not to—­but he’d be sure to see it in the papers.”

“Kitty—­you know what I mean.  He couldn’t see that in the papers.  He couldn’t see it anywhere unless you told him.  And if you did, it might make him very uncomfortable, you know.”

Poor Kitty, trying to be cheerful under the shadow of Sir Wilfrid Spence, was tortured by this conversation.  She had half a mind to say, “You don’t seem to think how uncomfortable you’re making me.”  But she forbore.  Any remark of that sort would rouse Lucia to efforts penitential in their motive, and more painful to bear than this pitiful outburst, the first in many months of patience and reserve.  She remembered how Lucia had once nursed her through a long illness in Dresden.  It had not been, as Kitty expressed it, “a pretty illness,” and she had been distinctly irritable in her convalescence; but Lucy had been all tenderness, had never betrayed impatience by any look or word.

“I shouldn’t mind anything, if only I’d been with him when he was ill.  But perhaps he’d rather I hadn’t been there.  I think it’s that, you know, that I really cannot bear.”

Kitty would have turned to comfort her, but for the timely entrance of Robert.  He brought a letter for Lucia which Kitty welcomed as an agreeable distraction.  It was from Horace Jewdwine.  “Any news?” she asked presently.

“Yes.  What do you think?  He’s going to Paris to-morrow.  Then he’s going on to Italy—­to Alassio, with Mr. Maddox.”

“Horace Jewdwine and Mr. Maddox?  What next?”

“It isn’t Horace that’s going.”  She gave the letter to Kitty because she had shrunk lately from speaking of Keith Rickman by his name.

“That’s a very different tale,” said Kitty

“I’m so glad he’s going.  That was what he always wanted to do.  Do you remember how I asked him to be my private secretary?  Now I’m his private secretary; which is as it should be.”

“You mean I am.”

“Yes.  Do you think you could hurry up so that he’ll get them before he goes?  Poor Kitty—­I can’t bear your having all these things to do for me.”

“Why not?  You’d do them for me, if it was I, not you.”

“I wish it were you.  I mean I wish I were doing things for you.  But you haven’t done them all, Kitty.  I did some.  I forget how many.”