“If you were horrid, you would n't have remembered me all this time,” she said, with a smile.
“That 's just how you looked when I called you 'my lady,' “ said Unity. “How do you think one could forget you? Besides, Mr. Herold is always talking about you.”
Stella opened her eyes. “Do you know Mr. Herold, too?”
“Of course. He's my guardian's dearest friend.”
Stella's heart sank lower. Her Great High Favourite, too, was in this conspiracy of concealment.
“Does--does your guardian ever speak of me?”
The other, seeing the implied question in her glance, continued: “I should n't dare to ask him. He's too great and wonderful.” Again the transfiguring light swept over her coarse features. “It 's beautiful of him to let me do things for him.”
“I look after his clothes, mend and darn and buy things for him, and I dust his books and see that he has what he likes to eat and, oh, hundreds of things--just so that he sha'n't have any worry at all.”
A new pain began to creep round Stella's heart, one she had never felt before, one that frightened her.
And Unity, her tongue loosened as it was with no one else in the world save Walter Herold, talked of the trivial round of her days and the Olympian majesty of John Risca.
“You must love him very much,” said Stella.
A glow came into her patient eyes as she nodded and fixed them on Stellamaris; and then a tear started.
She rose abruptly. “Would you like me to show you his room, Miss Stella--the room he works in?”
Stella rose, too. “He might not like it,” she said.
This was a point of view incomprehensible to Unity. Even the all-great master must bow to the sanctification brought into the house by Stella's feet. She said softly:
“He worships the ground you tread on. Don't you know that?”
“You think that if I'm afraid to go into his room, I don't care for him? It is n't that. I--I love him more than anything else in the world. I--” she stopped short, and the flush deepened, for she realized what she was saying. “It is something I can't quite explain to you,” she continued, after a pause. “In fact, I ought n't to stay any longer.”
Despite unregenerate Fatima temptation, despite a girl's romantic desire to see the table at which the dear one writes his immortal prose, she could pry no further into her Great Belovedest's home. She had pried too much already for her peace of mind.