“Oh yes, and you told me you didn’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 shouldn’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 it’s 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 as 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.  “It’s heroic?”

“Certainly—­call it that.”

It was what he would have liked indeed to call it.  “I am then a man of courage?”

“That’s what you were to show me.”

He still, however, wondered.  “But doesn’t the man of courage know what he’s afraid of—­or not afraid of?  I don’t know that, you see.  I don’t focus it.  I can’t name it.  I only know I’m exposed.”

“Yes, but exposed—­how shall I say?—­so directly.  So intimately.  That’s surely enough.”

“Enough to make you feel then—­as what we may call the end and the upshot of our watch—­that I’m not afraid?”

“You’re not afraid.  But it isn’t,” she said, “the end of our watch.  That is it isn’t the end of yours.  You’ve everything still to see.”

“Then why haven’t you?” he asked.  He had had, all along, to-day, the sense of her keeping something back, and he still had it.  As this was his first impression of that it quite made a date.  The case was the more marked as she didn’t at first answer; which in turn made him go on.  “You know something I don’t.”  Then his voice, for that of a man of courage, trembled a little.  “You know what’s to happen.”  Her silence, with the face she showed, was almost a confession—­it made him sure.  “You know, and you’re afraid to tell me.  It’s so bad that you’re afraid I’ll find out.”