ecide for a
change. It isn't one as to which there _can_ be a change. It's in the
lap of the gods. One's in the hands of one's law--there one is. As to
the form the law will take, the way it will operate, that's its own
affair."

"Yes," Miss Bartram replied; "of course one's fate's coming, of course it
_has_ come in its own form and its own way, all the while. Only, you
know, the form and the way in your case were to have been--well,
something so exceptional and, as one may say, so particularly _your_
own."

Something in this made him look at her with suspicion. "You say 'were to
_have_ been,' as if in your heart you had begun to doubt."

"Oh!" she vaguely protested.

"As if you believed," he went on, "that nothing will now take place."

She shook her head slowly but rather inscrutably. "You're far from my
thought."

He continued to look at her. "What then is the matter with you?"

"Well," she said after another wait, "the matter with me is simply that
I'm more sure than ever my curiosity, as you call it, will be but too
well repaid."

They were frankly grave now; he had got up from his seat, had turned once
more about the little drawing-room to which, year after year, he brought
his inevitable topic; in which he had, as he might have said, tasted
their intimate community with every sauce, where every object was as
familiar to him as the things of his own house and the very carpets were
worn with his fitful walk very much as the desks in old counting-houses
are worn by the elbows of generations of clerks. The generations of his
nervous moods had been at work there, and the place was the written
history of his whole middle life. Under the impression of what his
friend had just said he knew himself, for some reason, more aware of
these things; which made him, after a moment, stop again before her. "Is
it possibly that you've grown afraid?"

"Afraid?" He thought, as she repeated the word, that his question had
made her, a little, change colour; so that, lest he should have touched
on a truth, he explained very kindly: "You remember that that was what
you asked _me_ long ago--that first day at Weatherend."

"Oh yes, and you told me you didn't know--that I was to see for myself.
We've said little about it since, even in so long a time."

"Precisely," Marcher interposed--"quite as if it were too delicate a
matter for us to make free with. Quite as if we might find, on pressure,
that I _am_ afraid.