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Well, she listened, motionless and white in her chair, as on a decision to be made, so that her manner was fairly an avowal, though still, with a small fine inner stiffness, an imperfect surrender.”It wouldbe the worst,” she finally let herself say.”I mean the thing I’ve never said.”

It hushed him a moment.”More monstrous than all the monstrosities we’ve named?”

“More monstrous. Isn’t that what you sufficiently express,” she asked, “in calling it the worst?”

Marcher thought.”Assuredly–if you mean, as I do, something that includes all the loss and all the shame that are thinkable.”

“It would if it shouldhappen,” said May Bartram.”What we’re speaking of, remember, is only my idea.”

“It’s your belief,” Marcher returned.”That’s enough for me. I feel your beliefs are right. Therefore if, having this one, you give me no more light on it, you abandon me.”

“No, no!” she repeated.”I’m with you–don’t you see?–still.” And as to make it more vivid to him she rose from her chair–a movement she seldom risked in these days–and showed herself, all draped and all soft, in her fairness and slimness.”I haven’t forsaken you.”

It was really, in its effort against weakness, a generous assurance, and had the success of the impulse not, happily, been great, it would have touched him to pain more than to pleasure. But the cold charm in her eyes had spread, as she hovered before him, to all the rest of her person, so that it was for the minute almost a recovery of youth. He couldn’t pity her for that; he could only take her as she showed–as capable even yet of helping him. It was as if, at the same time, her light might at any instant go out; wherefore he must make the most of it. There passed before him with intensity the three or four things he wanted most to know; but the question that came of itself to his lips really covered the others.”Then tell me if I shall consciously suffer.”

She promptly shook her head.”Never!”

It confirmed the authority he imputed to her, and it produced on him an extraordinary effect.”Well, what’s better than that?Do you call that the worst?”

“You think nothing is better?” she asked.

She seemed to mean something so special that he again sharply wondered, though still with the dawn of a prospect of relief.”Why not, if one doesn’t know?”After which, as their eyes, over his question, met in a silence, the dawn deepened, and something to his purpose came prodigiously out of her very face. His own, as he took it in, suddenly flushed to the forehead, and he gasped with the force of a perception to which, on the instant, everything fitted. The sound of his gasp filled the air; then he became articulate.”I see–if I don’t suffer!”

In her own look, however, was doubt.”You see what?”

“Why what you mean–what you’ve always meant.”

She again shook her head.”What I mean isn’t what I’ve always meant. It’s different.”

“It’s something new?”

She hung back from it a little.”Something new. It’s not what you think. I see what you think.”

His divination drew breath then; only her correction might be wrong.”It isn’t that I ama blockhead?” he asked between faintness and grimness.”It isn’t that it’s all a mistake?”

“A mistake?” she pityingly echoed. Thatpossibility, for her, he saw, would be monstrous; and if she guaranteed him the immunity from pain it would accordingly not be what she had in mind.”Oh no,” she declared; “it’s nothing of that sort. You’ve been right.”

Yet he couldn’t help asking himself if she weren’t, thus pressed, speaking but to save him. It seemed to him he should be most in a hole if his history should prove all a platitude.”Are you telling me the truth, so that I shan’t have been a bigger idiot than I can bear to know?I haven’tlived with a vain imagination, in the most besotted illusion?I haven’t waited but to see the door shut in my face?”