indifferent to any other question; he would doubtless have devoted

more time to the odd accident of his lapse of memory if he hadn't
been moved to devote so much to the sweetness, the comfort, as he

felt, for the future, that this accident itself had helped to keep
fresh. It had never entered into his plan that any one should

"know", and mainly for the reason that it wasn't in him to tell any
one. That would have been impossible, for nothing but the

amusement of a cold world would have waited on it. Since, however,
a mysterious fate had opened his mouth betimes, in spite of him, he

would count that a compensation and profit by it to the utmost.
That the right person SHOULD know tempered the asperity of his

secret more even than his shyness had permitted him to imagine; and
May Bartram was clearly right, because--well, because there she

was. Her knowledge simply settled it; he would have been sure
enough by this time had she been wrong. There was that in his

situation, no doubt, that disposed him too much to see her as a
mere confidant, taking all her light for him from the fact--the

fact only--of her interest in his predicament; from her mercy,
sympathy, seriousness, her consent not to regard him as the

funniest of the funny. Aware, in fine, that her price for him was
just in her giving him this constant sense of his being admirably

spared, he was careful to remember that she had also a life of her
own, with things that might happen to HER, things that in

friendship one should likewise take account of. Something fairly
remarkable came to pass with him, for that matter, in this

connexion--something represented by a certain passage of his
consciousness, in the suddenest way, from one extreme to the other.

He had thought himself, so long as nobody knew, the most
disinterested person in the world, carrying his concentrated

burden, his perpetualsuspense, ever so quietly, holding his tongue
about it, giving others no glimpse of it nor of its effect upon his

life, asking of them no allowance and only making on his side all
those that were asked. He hadn't disturbed people with the

queerness of their having to know a haunted man, though he had had
moments of rather special temptation on hearing them say they were

forsooth "unsettled." If they were as unsettled as he was--he who
had never been settled for an hour in his life--they would know

what it meant. Yet it wasn't, all the same, for him to make them,
and he listened to them civilly enough. This was why he had such

good--though possibly such rather colourless--manners; this was
why, above all, he could regard himself, in a greedy world, as

decently--as in fact perhaps even a little sublimely--unselfish.
Our point is accordingly that he valued this character quite

sufficiently to measure his present danger of letting it lapse,
against which he promised himself to be much on his guard. He was

quite ready, none the less, to be selfish just a little, since
surely no more charming occasion for it had come to him. "Just a

little," in a word, was just as much as Mss Bartram, taking one day
with another, would let him. He never would be in the least

coercive, and would keep well before him the lines on which
consideration for her--the very highest--ought to proceed. He

would thoroughly establish the heads under which her affairs, her
requirements, her peculiarities--he went so far as to give them the

latitude of that name--would come into their intercourse. All this
naturally was a sign of how much he took the intercourse itself for

granted. There was nothing more to be done about that. It simply
existed; had sprung into being with her first penetrating question

to him in the autumn light there at Weatherend. The real form it
should have taken on the basis that stood out large was the form of

their marrying. But the devil in this was that the very basis
itself put marrying out of the question. His conviction, his

apprehension, his obsession, in short, wasn't a privilege he could
invite a woman to share; and that consequence of it was precisely

what was the matter with him. Something or other lay in wait for
him, amid the twists and the turns of the months and the years,

like a crouching Beast in the Jungle. It signified little whether
the crouching Beast were destined to slay him or to be slain. The

definite point was the inevitable spring of the creature; and the
definite lesson from that was that a man of feeling didn't cause

himself to be accompanied by a lady on a tiger-hunt. Such was the
image under which he had ended by figuring his life.

They had at first, none the less, in the scattered hours spent
together, made no allusion to that view of it; which was a sign he

was handsomely alert to give that he didn't expect, that he in fact
didn't care, always to be talking about it. Such a feature in

one's outlook was really like a hump on one's back. The difference
it made every minute of the day existed quite independently of

discussion. One discussed of course LIKE a hunchback, for there
was always, if nothing else, the hunchback face. That remained,

and she was watching him; but people watched best, as a general
thing, in silence, so that such would be predominantly the manner

of their vigil. Yet he didn't want, at the same time, to be tense
and solemn; tense and solemn was what he imagined he too much

showed for with other people. The thing to be, with the one person
who knew, was easy and natural--to make the reference rather than

be seeming to avoid it, to avoid it rather than be seeming to make
it, and to keep it, in any case, familiar, facetious even, rather

than pedantic and portentous. Some such consideration as the
latter was doubtless in his mind for instance when he wrote

pleasantly to Miss Bartram that perhaps the great thing he had so
long felt as in the lap of the gods was no more than this

circumstance, which touched him so nearly, of her acquiring a house
in London. It was the first allusion they had yet again made,

needing any other hitherto so little; but when she replied, after
having given him the news, that she was by no means satisfied with

such a trifle as the climax to so special a suspense, she almost
set him wondering if she hadn't even a larger conception of

singularity for him than he had for himself. He was at all events
destined to become aware little by little, as time went by, that

she was all the while looking at his life, judging it, measuring
it, in the light of the thing she knew, which grew to be at last,

with the consecration of the years, never mentioned between them
save as "the real truth" about him. That had always been his own

form of reference to it, but she adopted the form so quietly that,
looking back at the end of a period, he knew there was no moment at

which it was traceable that she had, as he might say, got inside
his idea, or exchanged the attitude of beautifully indulging for

that of still more beautifully believing him.
It was always open to him to accuse her of seeing him but as the

most harmless of maniacs, and this, in the long run--since it
covered so much ground--was his easiest description of their

friendship. He had a screw loose for her but she liked him in
spite of it and was practically, against the rest of the world, his

kind wise keeper, unremunerated but fairly amused and, in the
absence of other near ties, not disreputably occupied. The rest of

the world of course thought him queer, but she, she only, knew how,
and above all why, queer; which was precisely what enabled her to

dispose the concealing veil in the right folds. She took his
gaiety from him--since it had to pass with them for gaiety--as she

took everything else; but she certainly so far justified by her
unerring touch his finer sense of the degree to which he had ended

by convincing her. SHE at least never spoke of the secret of his
life except as "the real truth about you," and she had in fact a

wonderful way of making it seem, as such, the secret of her own
life too. That was in fine how he so constantly felt her as

allowing for him; he couldn't on the whole call it anything else.
He allowed for himself, but she, exactly, allowed still more;

partly because, better placed for a sight of the matter, she traced
his unhappy perversion through reaches of its course into which he

could scarce follow it. He knew how he felt, but, besides knowing