in still greater measure of her companion.  If she was old, or almost, John Marcher assuredly was, and yet it was her showing of the lesson, not his own, that brought the truth home to him.  His surprises began here; when once they had begun they multiplied; they came rather with a rush:  it was as if, in the oddest way in the world, they had all been kept back, sown in a thick cluster, for the late afternoon of life, the time at which for people in general the unexpected has died out.

One of them was that he should have caught himself—­for he had so done—­really wondering if the great accident would take form now as nothing more than his being condemned to see this charming woman, this admirable friend, pass away from him.  He had never so unreservedly qualified her as while confronted in thought with such a possibility; in spite of which there was small doubt for him that as an answer to his long riddle the mere effacement of even so fine a feature of his situation would be an abject anticlimax.  It would represent, as connected with his past attitude, a drop of dignity under the shadow of which his existence could only become the most grotesques of failures.  He had been far from holding it a failure—­long as he had waited for the appearance that was to make it a success.  He had waited for quite another thing, not for such a thing as that.  The breath of his good faith came short, however, as he recognised how long he had waited, or how long at least his companion had.  That she, at all events, might be recorded as having waited in vain—­this affected him sharply, and all the more because of his it first having done little more than amuse himself with the idea.  It grew more grave as the gravity of her condition grew, and the state of mind it produced in him, which he himself ended by watching as if it had been some definite disfigurement of his outer person, may pass for another of his surprises.  This conjoined itself still with another, the really stupefying consciousness of a question that he would have allowed to shape itself had he dared.  What did everything mean—­what, that is, did she mean, she and her vain waiting and her probable death and the soundless admonition of it all—­unless that, at this time of day, it was simply, it was overwhelmingly too late?  He had never at any stage of his queer consciousness admitted the whisper of such a correction; he had never till within these last few months been so false to his conviction as not to hold that what was to come to him had time, whether he struck himself as having it or not.  That at last, at last, he certainly hadn’t it, to speak of, or had it but in the scantiest measure—­such, soon enough, as things went with him, became the inference with which his old obsession had to reckon:  and this it was not helped to do by the more and more confirmed appearance that the great vagueness casting the long shadow in which he had lived had, to attest