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, hitherto hidden, 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  Her eyes closed for a little, as if, withdrawn into herself, she were for a last time trying.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 he had no vision of her after this that was anything but darkness and doom.  They had parted for ever in that strange talk; access to her chamber of pain, rigidly guarded, was almost wholly forbidden him; he was feeling now moreover, in the face of doctors, nurses, the two or three relatives attracted doubtless by the presumption of what she had to “leave,” how few were the rights, as they were called in such cases, that he had to put forward, and how odd it might even seem that their intimacy shouldn’t have given him more of them.  The stupidest fourth cousin had more, even though she had been nothing in such a person’s life.  She had been a feature of features in his, for what else was it to have been so indispensable?  Strange beyond saying were the ways of existence, baffling for him the anomaly of his lack, as he felt it to be, of producible claim.  A woman might have been, as it were, everything to him, and it might yet present him, in no connexion that any one seemed held to recognise.  If this was the case in these closing weeks it was the case more sharply on the occasion of the last offices rendered, in the great