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Well, he was to know within the week, for though she kept him a while at bay, left him restless and wretched during a series of days on each of which he asked about her only again to have to turn away, she ended his trial by receiving him where she had always received him. Yet she had been brought out at some hazard into the presence of so many of the things that were, consciously, vainly, half their past, and there was scant service left in the gentleness of her mere desire, all too visible, to check his obsession and wind up his long trouble. That was clearly what she wanted; the one thing more for her own peace while she could still put out her hand. He was so affected by her state that, once seated by her chair, he was moved to let everything go; it was she herself therefore who brought him back, took up again, before she dismissed him, her last word of the other time. She showed how she wished to leave their business in order.”I’m not sure you understood. You’ve nothing to wait for more. It hascome.”

Oh how he looked at her!”Really?”

“Really.”

“The thing that, as you said, wasto?”

“The thing that we began in our youth to watch for.”

Face to face with her once more he believed her; it was a claim to which he had so abjectly little to oppose.”You mean that it has come as a positive definite occurrence, with a name and a date?”

“Positive. Definite. I don’t know about the ‘name,’ but, oh with a date!”

He found himself again too helplessly at sea.”But come in the night–come and passed me by?”

May Bartram had her strange faint smile.”Oh no, it hasn’t passed you by!”

“But if I haven’t been aware of it and it hasn’t touched me–?”

“Ah your not being aware of it”–and she seemed to hesitate an instant to deal with this–“your not being aware of it is the strangeness in the strangeness. It’s the wonder ofthe wonder.” She spoke as with the softness almost of a sick child, yet now at last, at the end of all, with the perfect straightness of a sibyl. She visibly knew that she knew, and the effect on him was of something co-ordinate, in its high character, with the law that had ruled him. It was the true voice of the law; so on her lips would the law itself have sounded.”It hastouched you,” she went on.”It has done its office. It has made you all its own.”

“So utterly without my knowing it?”

“So utterly without your knowing it.”His hand, as he leaned to her, was on the arm of her chair, and, dimly smiling always now, she placed her own on it.”It’s enough if I know it.”

“Oh!” he confusedly breathed, as she herself of late so often had done.

“What I long ago said is true. You’ll never know now, and I think you ought to be content. You’ve hadit,” said May Bartram.

“But had what?”

“Why what was to have marked you out. The proof of your law. It has acted. I’m too glad,” she then bravely added, “to have been able to see what it’s not.”

He continued to attach his eyes to her, and with the sense that it was all beyond him, and that shewas too, he would still have sharply challenged her hadn’t he so felt it an abuse of her weakness to do more than take devoutly what she gave him, take it hushed as to a revelation. If he did speak, it was out of the foreknowledge of his loneliness to come.”If you’re glad of what it’s ‘not’ it might then have been worse?”