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“Precisely,” Marcher interposed–“quite as if it were too delicate a matter for us to make free with. Quite as if we might find, on pressure, that I amafraid. For then,” he said, “we shouldn’t, should we? quite know what to do.”

She had for the time no answer to this question.”There have been days when I thought you were. Only, of course,” she added, “there have been days when we have thought almost anything.”

“Everything. Oh!” Marcher softly groaned, as with a gasp, half spent, at the face, more uncovered just then than it had been for a long while, of the imagination always with them. It had always had it’s incalculable moments of glaring out, quite as with the very eyes of the very Beast, and, used as he was to them, they could still draw from him the tribute of a sigh that rose from the depths of his being. All they had thought, first and last, rolled over him; the past seemed to have been reduced to mere barren speculation. This in fact was what the place had just struck him as so full of–the simplification of everything but the state of suspense. That remained only by seeming to hang in the void surrounding it. Even his original fear, if fear it as had been, had lost itself in the desert.”I judge, however,” he continued, “that you see I’m not afraid now.”

“What I see, as I make it out, is that you’ve achieved something almost unprecedented in the way of getting used to danger. Living with it so long and so closely you’ve lost your sense of it; you know it’s there, but you’re indifferent, and you cease even, as of old, to have to whistle in the dark. Considering what the danger is,” May Bartram wound up, “I’m bound to say I don’t think your attitude could well be surpassed.”

John Marcher faintly smiled.”It’s heroic?”

“Certainly–call it that.”

It was what he would have liked indeed to call it.”I amthen a man of courage?”

“That’s what you were to show me.”

He still, however, wondered.”But doesn’t the man of courage know what he’s afraid of–or not afraid of?I don’t know that, you see. I don’t focus it. I can’t name it. I only know I’m exposed.”

“Yes, but exposed–how shall I say?–so directly. So intimately. That’s surely enough.”

“Enough to make you feel then–as what we may call the end and the upshot of our watch–that I’m not afraid?”

“You’re not afraid. But it isn’t,” she said, “the end of our watch. That is it isn’t the end of yours. You’ve everything still to see.”

“Then why haven’t you?” he asked. He had had, all along, to-day, the sense of her keeping something back, and he still had it. As this was his first impression of that it quite made a date. The case was the more marked as she didn’t at first answer; which in turn made him go on.”You know something I don’t.”Then his voice, for that of a man of courage, trembled a little.”You know what’s to happen.”Her silence, with the face she showed, was almost a confession–it made him sure.”You know, and you’re afraid to tell me. It’s so bad that you’re afraid I’ll find out.”

All this might be true, for she did look as if, unexpectedly to her, he had crossed some mystic line that she had secretly drawn round her. Yet she might, after all, not have worried; and the real climax was that he himself, at all events, needn’t.”You’ll never find out.”

III

It was all to have made, none the less, as I have said, a date; which came out in the fact that again and again, even after long intervals, other things that passed between them were in relation to this hour but the character of recalls and results. Its immediate effect had been indeed rather to lighten insistence– almost to provoke a reaction; as if their topic had dropped by its own weight and as if moreover, for that matter, Marcher had been visited by one of his occasional warnings against egotism. He had kept up, he felt, and very decently on the whole, his consciousness of the importance of not being selfish, and it was true that he had never sinned in that direction without promptly enough trying to press the scales the other way. He often repaired his fault, the season permitting, by inviting his friend to accompany him to the opera; and it not infrequently thus happened that, to show he didn’t wish her to have but one sort of food for her mind, he was the cause of her appearing there with him a dozen nights in the month. It even happened that, seeing her home at such times, he occasionally went in with her to finish, as he called it, the evening, and, the better to make his point, sat down to the frugal but always careful little supper that awaited his pleasure. His point was made, he thought, by his not eternally insisting with her on himself; made for instance, at such hours, when it befell that, her piano at hand and each of them familiar with it, they went over passages of the opera together. It chanced to be on one of these occasions, however, that he reminded her of her not having answered a certain question he had put to her during the talk that had taken place between them on her last birthday.”What is it that saves you?”–saved her, he meant, from that appearance of variation from the usual human type. If he had practically escaped remark, as she pretended, by doing, in the most important particular, what most men do–find the answer to life in patching up an alliance of a sort with a woman no better than himself–how had she escaped it, and how could the alliance, such as it was, since they must suppose it had been more or less noticed, have failed to make her rather positively talked about?