Something—­and this reached him with a pang—­that he, John Marcher, hadn’t; the proof of which was precisely John Marcher’s arid end.  No passion had ever touched him, for this was what passion meant; he had survived and maundered and pined, but where had been his deep ravage?  The extraordinary thing we speak of was the sudden rush of the result of this question.  The sight that had just met his eyes named to him, as in letters of quick flame, something he had utterly, insanely missed, and what he had missed made these things a train of fire, made them mark themselves in an anguish of inward throbs.  He had seen outside of his life, not learned it within, the way a woman was mourned when she had been loved for herself:  such was the force of his conviction of the meaning of the stranger’s face, which still flared for him as a smoky torch.  It hadn’t come to him, the knowledge, on the wings of experience; it had brushed him, jostled him, upset him, with the disrespect of chance, the insolence of accident.  Now that the illumination had begun, however, it blazed to the zenith, and what he presently stood there gazing at was the sounded void of his life.  He gazed, he drew breath, in pain; he turned in his dismay, and, turning, he had before him in sharper incision than ever the open page of his story.  The name on the table smote him as the passage of his neighbour had done, and what it said to him, full in the face, was that she was what he had missed.  This was the awful thought, the answer to all the past, the vision at the dread clearness of which he turned as cold as the stone beneath him.  Everything fell together, confessed, explained, overwhelmed; leaving him most of all stupefied at the blindness he had cherished.  The fate he had been marked for he had met with a vengeance—­he had emptied the cup to the lees; he had been the man of his time, the man, to whom nothing on earth was to have happened.  That was the rare stroke—­that was his visitation.  So he saw it, as we say, in pale horror, while the pieces fitted and fitted.  So she had seen it while he didn’t, and so she served at this hour to drive the truth home.  It was the truth, vivid and monstrous, that all the while he had waited the wait was itself his portion.  This the companion of his vigil had at a given moment made out, and she had then offered him the chance to baffle his doom.  One’s doom, however, was never baffled, and on the day she told him his own had come down she had seen him but stupidly stare at the escape she offered him.

The escape would have been to love her; then, then he would have lived. She had lived—­who could say now with what passion?—­since she had loved him for himself; whereas he had never thought of her (ah how it hugely glared at him!) but in the chill of his egotism and the light of her use.  Her spoken words came back to him—­the chain stretched and stretched.  The Beast had lurked