grey London cemetery, to what had been mortal, to what had been precious, in his friend.  The concourse at her grave was not numerous, but he saw himself treated as scarce more nearly concerned with it than if there had been a thousand others.  He was in short from this moment face to face with the fact that he was to profit extraordinarily little by the interest May Bartram had taken in him.  He couldn’t quite have said what he expected, but he hadn’t surely expected this approach to a double privation.  Not only had her interest failed him, but he seemed to feel himself unattended—­and for a reason he couldn’t seize—­by the distinction, the dignity, the propriety, if nothing else, of the man markedly bereaved.  It was as if, in the view of society he had not been markedly bereaved, as if there still failed some sign or proof of it, and as if none the less his character could never be affirmed nor the deficiency ever made up.  There were moments as the weeks went by when he would have liked, by some almost aggressive act, to take his stand on the intimacy of his loss, in order that it might be questioned and his retort, to the relief of his spirit, so recorded; but the moments of an irritation more helpless followed fast on these, the moments during which, turning things over with a good conscience but with a bare horizon, he found himself wondering if he oughtn’t to have begun, so to speak, further back.

He found himself wondering indeed at many things, and this last speculation had others to keep it company.  What could he have done, after all, in her lifetime, without giving them both, as it were, away?  He couldn’t have made known she was watching him, for that would have published the superstition of the Beast.  This was what closed his mouth now—­now that the Jungle had been thrashed to vacancy and that the Beast had stolen away.  It sounded too foolish and too flat; the difference for him in this particular, the extinction in his life of the element of suspense, was such as in fact to surprise him.  He could scarce have said what the effect resembled; the abrupt cessation, the positive prohibition, of music perhaps, more than anything else, in some place all adjusted and all accustomed to sonority and to attention.  If he could at any rate have conceived lifting the veil from his image at some moment of the past (what had he done, after all, if not lift it to her?) so to do this to-day, to talk to people at large of the Jungle cleared and confide to them that he now felt it as safe, would have been not only to see them listen as to a goodwife’s tale, but really to hear himself tell one.  What it presently came to in truth was that poor Marcher waded through his beaten grass, where no life stirred, where no breath sounded, where no evil eye seemed to gleam from a possible lair, very much as if vaguely looking for the Beast, and still more as if acutely missing it.  He walked about in an existence that had grown strangely