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 HAS come."

Oh how he looked at her! "Really?"
"Really."

"The thing that, as you said, WAS to?"
"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 positivedefiniteoccurrence, 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" target="_blank" title="ad.无能为力地">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 OF the 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 HAS touched 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 HAD it," 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 SHE was 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?"
She turned her eyes away, she looked straight before her; with

which after a moment: "Well, you know our fears."
He wondered. "It's something then we never feared?"

On this slowly she turned to him. "Did we ever dream, with all our
dreams, that we should sit and talk of it thus?"

He tried for a little to make out that they had; but it was as if
their dreams, numberless enough, were in solution in some thick

cold mist through which thought lost itself. "It might have been
that we couldn't talk."

"Well"--she did her best for him--"not from this side. This, you
see," she said, "is the OTHER side."

"I think," poor Marcher returned, "that all sides are the same to
me." Then, however, as she gently shook her head in correction:

"We mightn't, as it were, have got across--?"
"To where we are--no. We're HERE"--she made her weak emphasis.

"And much good does it do us!" was her friend's frank comment.
"It does us the good it can. It does us the good that IT isn't

here. It's past. It's behind," said May Bartram. "Before--" but
her voice dropped.

He had got up, not to tire her, but it was hard to combat his
yearning. She after all told him nothing but that his light had

failed--which he knew well enough without her. "Before--?" he
blankly echoed.

"Before you see, it was always to COME. That kept it present."
"Oh I don't care what comes now! Besides," Marcher added, "it

seems to me I liked it better present, as you say, than I can like
it absent with YOUR absence."

"Oh mine!"--and her pale hands made light of it.
"With the absence of everything." He had a dreadful sense of

standing there before her for--so far as anything but this proved,
this bottomless drop was concerned--the last time of their life.

It rested on him with a weight he felt he could scarce bear, and
this weight it apparently was that still pressed out what remained

in him of speakable protest. "I believe you; but I can't begin to
pretend I understand. NOTHING, for me, is past; nothing WILL pass

till I pass myself, which I pray my stars may be as soon as
possible. Say, however," he added, "that I've eaten my cake, as

you contend, to the last crumb--how can the thing I've never felt
at all be the thing I was marked out to feel?"

She met him perhaps less directly, but she met him unperturbed.
"You take your 'feelings' for granted. You were to suffer your

fate. That was not necessarily to know it."
"How in the world--when what is such knowledge but suffering?"

She looked up at him a while in silence. "No--you don't
understand."

"I suffer," said John Marcher.
"Don't, don't!"

"How can I help at least THAT?"
"DON'T!" May Bartram repeated.

She spoke it in a tone so special, in spite of her weakness, that
he stared an instant--stared as if some light, hithertohidden, had

shimmered across his vision. Darkness again closed over it, but
the gleam had already become for him an idea. "Because I haven't

the right--?"
"Don't KNOW--when you needn't," she mercifully urged. "You

needn't--for we shouldn't."
"Shouldn't?" If he could but know what she meant!

"No--it's too much."
"Too much?" he still asked but with a mystification that was the

next moment of a sudden to give way. Her words, if they meant
something, affected him in this light--the light also of her wasted

face--as meaning ALL, and the sense of what knowledge had been for
herself came over him with a rush which broke through into a

question. "Is it of that then you're dying?"
She but watched him, gravely at first, as to see, with this, where

he was, and she might have seen something or feared something that
moved her sympathy. "I would live for you still--if I could." Her

eyes closed for a little, as if, withdrawn into herself, she were
for a last time trying. "But I can't!" she said as she raised them

again to take leave of him.
She couldn't indeed, as but too promptly and sharply appeared, and