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He had asked her that in the past often enough; they had, with the odd irregular rhythm of their intensities and avoidances, exchanged ideas about it and then had seen the ideas washed away by cool intervals, washed like figures traced in sea-sand. It had ever been the mark of their talk that the oldest allusions in it required but a little dismissal and reaction to come out again, sounding for the hour as new. She could thus at present meet his enquiry quite freshly and patiently.”Oh yes, I’ve repeatedly thought, only it always seemed to me of old that I couldn’t quite make up my mind. I thought of dreadful things, between which it was difficult to choose; and so must you have done.”

“Rather!I feel now as if I had scarce done anything else. I appear to myself to have spent my life in thinking of nothing but dreadful things. A great many of them I’ve at different times named to you, but there were others I couldn’t name.”

“They were too, too dreadful?”

“Too, too dreadful–some of them.”

She looked at him a minute, and there came to him as he met it, an inconsequent sense that her eyes, when one got their full clearness, were still as beautiful as they had been in youth, only beautiful with a strange cold light–a light that somehow was a part of the effect, if it wasn’t rather a part of the cause, of the pale hard sweetness of the season and the hour.”And yet,” she said at last, “there are horrors we’ve mentioned.”

It deepened the strangeness to see her, as such a figure in such a picture, talk of “horrors,” but she was to do in a few minutes something stranger yet–though even of this he was to take the full measure but afterwards–and the note of it already trembled. It was, for the matter of that, one of the signs that her eyes were having again the high flicker of their prime. He had to admit, however, what she said.”Oh yes, there were times when we did go far.”He caught himself in the act of speaking as if it all were over. Well, he wished it were; and the consummation depended for him clearly more and more on his friend.

But she had now a soft smile.”Oh far–!”

It was oddly ironic.”Do you mean you’re prepared to go further?”

She was frail and ancient and charming as she continued to look at him, yet it was rather as if she had lost the thread.”Do you consider that we went far?”

“Why I thought it the point you were just making–that we hadlooked most things in the face.”

“Including each other?”She still smiled.”But you’re quite right. We’ve had together great imaginations, often great fears; but some of them have been unspoken.”

“Then the worst–we haven’t faced that. I couldface it, I believe, if I knew what you think it. I feel,” he explained, “as if I had lost my power to conceive such things.”And he wondered if he looked as blank as he sounded.”It’s spent.”

“Then why do you assume,” she asked, “that mine isn’t?”

“Because you’ve given me signs to the contrary. It isn’t a question for you of conceiving, imagining, comparing. It isn’t a question now of choosing.”At last he came out with it.”You know something I don’t. You’ve shown me that before.”

These last words had affected her, he made out in a moment, exceedingly, and she spoke with firmness.”I’ve shown you, my dear, nothing.”

He shook his head.”You can’t hide it.”

“Oh, oh!” May Bartram sounded over what she couldn’t hide. It was almost a smothered groan.

“You admitted it months ago, when I spoke of it to you as of something you were afraid I should find out. Your answer was that I couldn’t, that I wouldn’t, and I don’t pretend I have. But you had something therefore in mind, and I see now how it must have been, how it still is, the possibility that, of all possibilities, has settled itself for you as the worst. This,” he went on, “is why I appeal to you. I’m only afraid of ignorance to-day–I’m not afraid of knowledge.”And then as for a while she said nothing: “What makes me sure is that I see in your face and feel here, in this air and amid these appearances, that you’re out of it. You’ve done. You’ve had your experience. You leave me to my fate.”