ragedy would fade and the beauty of their last
weeks together would remain with her. There was no cavern yawning behind
Kitty's figure; life, inexorably, showed him her smiling future.

And, for himself; well, if it was tragic to have to die, it was a
tragedy one got used to. He might have felt it more if only Kitty hadn't
been there to feel it so superabundantly for him. No: he could keep up;
he could see to it that the pendulum didn't falter; but he couldn't hide
from himself that its swing was growing mechanical.

By the end of the third week the serpent was awake and walking in
Paradise. Holland was tired; profoundly tired.

He found his wife's eyes on him one day as they sat with books under the
trees on the lawn. He tried to read the books now, though in a casual
manner that would offer no offence to Kitty's unoccupied hands and eyes.
He wanted very much to read and to forget himself--to forget Kitty--for
a little while. It was difficult to do this when such a desultory air
must be assumed, when he must be ready to answer anything she said at a
moment's notice, and must remember to look up and smile at her or to
read some passage aloud to her at every few pages. But he had been
trying thus to combine oblivion and alertness when a longer interval
than usual of the first held him beguiled, and alertness, when it
returned, returned too late. Kitty's eyes made him think of the eyes she
had gazed with on the day of revelation in the library. They were
candid, they were frightened; the eyes of the real child. Now, as then,
they were drinking in some new knowledge; a new fear and an old fear,
come close at last, were pressing on her. He felt so tired that he would
have liked to look away and to have pretended not to see; but he was not
so tired as to be cruel, and he tried to smile at her, as, tilting his
hat over his eyes so that they were shadowed, he asked her what she was
thinking of.

She rose and came to him, kneeling down beside his chair and putting her
hands on his shoulders.

"What is the matter, Kitty?" he asked her, as he had asked on that
morning three weeks before.

"Nicholas--Nicholas--are you feeling worse?" she returned.

Holland was surprised and almost relieved. It was no new demand, it was
merely a sharper fear. And perhaps she was right, perhaps he was feeling
worse and the end was approaching. If so, any languor would be taken as
symptomatic of dissolution and not of indifference, and he migh