Fair I mean to have so involved and – since one may say it – interested you. I almost feel as if you had n't really had time to do anything else.«

»Anything else but be interested?« she asked. »Ah what else does one ever want to be? If I've been ›watching‹ with you, as we long ago agreed I was to do, watching's always in itself an absorption.«

»Oh certainly,« John Marcher said, »if you had n't had your curiosity –! Only does n't it sometimes come to you as time goes on that your curiosity is n't being particularly repaid?«

May Bartram had a pause. »Do you ask that, by any chance, because you feel at all that yours is n't? I mean because you have to wait so long.«

Oh he understood what she meant! »For the thing to happen that never does happen? For the beast to jump out? No, I'm just where I was about it. It is n't a matter as to which I can choose, I can decide for a change. It is n't one as to which there can be a change. It's in the lap of the gods. One's in the hands of one's law – there one is. As to the form the law will take, the way it will operate, that's its own affair.«

»Yes,« Miss Bartram replied; »of course one's fate's coming, of course it has come in its own form and its own way, all the while. Only, you know, the form and the way in your case were to have been – well, something so exceptional and, as one may say, so particularly your own.«

Something in this made him look at her with suspicion. »You say ›were to have been,‹ as if in your heart you had begun to doubt.«

»Oh!« she vaguely protested.

»As if you believed,« he went on, »that nothing will now take place.«

She shook her head slowly but rather inscrutably. »You're far from my thought.«

He continued to look at her. »What then is the matter with you?«

»Well,« she said after another wait, »the matter with me is simply that I'm more sure than ever my curiosity, as you call it, will be but too well repaid.«

They were frankly grave now; he had got up from his seat, had turned once more about the little drawing-room to which, year after year, he brought his inevitable topic; in which he had, as he might have said, tasted their intimate community with every sauce, where every object was as familiar to him as the things of his own house and the very carpets were worn with his fitful walk very much as the desks in old counting-houses are worn by the elbows of generations of clerks. The generations of his nervous moods had been at work there, and the place was the written history of his whole middle life. Under the impression of what his friend had just said he knew himself, for some reason, more aware of these things; which made him, after a moment, stop again before her. »Is it possibly that you've grown afraid?«

»Afraid?« He thought, as she repeated the word, that his question had made her, a little, change colour; so that, lest he should have touched on a truth, he explained very kindly: »You remember that that was what you asked me long ago – that first day at Weatherend.«

»Oh yes, and you told me you did n't know – that I was to see for myself. We've said little about it since, even in so long a time.«

»Precisely,« Marcher interposed – »quite as if it were too delicate a matter for us to make free with. Quite as if we might find, on pressure, that I am afraid. For then,« he said, »we should n't, should we? quite know what to do.«

She had for the time no answer to this question. »There have been days when I thought you were. Only, of course,« she added, »there have been days when we have thought almost anything.«

»Everything. Oh!« Marcher softly groaned as with a gasp, half-spent, at the face, more uncovered just then than it had been for a long while, of the imagination always with them. It had always had its incalculable moments of glaring out, quite as with the very eyes of the very Beast, and, used as he was to them, they could still draw from him the tribute of a sigh that rose from the depths of his being. All they had thought, first and last, rolled over him; the past seemed to have been reduced to mere barren speculation. This in fact was what the place had just struck him as so full of – the simplification of everything but the state of suspense. That remained only by seeming to hang in the void surrounding it. Even his original fear, if fear it had been, had lost itself in the desert. »I judge, however,« he continued, »that you see I'm not afraid now.«

»What I see, as I make it out, is that you've achieved something almost unprecedented in the way of getting used to danger. Living with it so long and so closely you've lost your sense of it; you know it's there, but you're indifferent, and you cease even, as of old, to have to whistle in the dark. Considering what the danger is,« May Bartram wound up, »I'm bound to say I don't think your attitude could well be surpassed.«

John Marcher faintly smiled.