Chapter 5 Summary

Marcher comes to see May, but she is not well enough to see him. He realizes that her dying is, in fact, the Beast in the Jungle—a catastrophe that will change his life. She has been with him every step of the way, and now she is going.

He gets to see her at last and she tells him that the thing they have watched for has come and it has touched him. He just doesn't know it yet. She is grateful, she says, to know what it is not.

"Before, you see, it was always to come. That kept it present," she tells him.

He is even more bereaved in her passing. The attitude toward him by family and friends is that he has no claim to her memory. His position has merely been friend in their eyes. But he feels...