“Don’t you know—­now?”

“’Now’—?” She had spoken as if some difference had been made within the moment.  But her maid, quickly obedient to her bell, was already with them.  “I know nothing.”  And he was afterwards to say to himself that he must have spoken with odious impatience, such an impatience as to show that, supremely disconcerted, he washed his hands of the whole question.

“Oh!” said May Bartram.

“Are you in pain?” he asked as the woman went to her.

“No,” said May Bartram.

Her maid, who had put an arm round her as if to take her to her room, fixed on him eyes that appealingly contradicted her; in spite of which, however, he showed once more his mystification.

“What then has happened?”

She was once more, with her companion’s help, on her feet, and, feeling withdrawal imposed on him, he had blankly found his hat and gloves and had reached the door.  Yet he waited for her answer.  “What was to,” she said.

CHAPTER V

He came back the next day, but she was then unable to see him, and as it was literally the first time this had occurred in the long stretch of their acquaintance he turned away, defeated and sore, almost angry—­or feeling at least that such a break in their custom was really the beginning of the end—­and wandered alone with his thoughts, especially with the one he was least able to keep down.  She was dying and he would lose her; she was dying and his life would end.  He stopped in the Park, into which he had passed, and stared before him at his recurrent doubt.  Away from her the doubt pressed again; in her presence he had believed her, but as he felt his forlornness he threw himself into the explanation that, nearest at hand, had most of a miserable warmth for him and least of a cold torment.  She had deceived him to save him—­to put him off with something in which he should be able to rest.  What could the thing that was to happen to him be, after all, but just this thing that had began to happen?  Her dying, her death, his consequent solitude—­that was what he had figured as the Beast in the Jungle, that was what had been in the lap of the gods.  He had had her word for it as he left her—­what else on earth could she have meant?  It wasn’t a thing of a monstrous order; not a fate rare and distinguished; not a stroke of fortune that overwhelmed and immortalised; it had only the stamp of the common doom.  But poor Marcher at this hour judged the common doom sufficient.  It would serve his turn, and even as the consummation of infinite waiting he would bend his pride to accept it.  He sat down on a bench in the twilight.  He hadn’t been a fool.  Something had been, as she had said, to come.  Before he rose indeed it had quite struck him that the final fact really matched with the long avenue through which he had had to reach it.  As sharing his suspense and as giving herself all, giving her life, to bring it to an end, she had come with him every step of the way.  He had lived by her aid, and to leave her behind would be cruelly, damnably to miss her.  What could be more overwhelming than that?