his first impression of that it quite made a date. The case was the more
marked as she didn't at first answer; which in turn made him go on. "You
know something I don't." Then his voice, for that of a man of courage,
trembled a little. "You know what's to happen." Her silence, with the
face she showed, was almost a confession--it made him sure. "You know,
and you're afraid to tell me. It's so bad that you're afraid I'll find
out."

All this might be true, for she did look as if, unexpectedly to her, he
had crossed some mystic line that she had secretly drawn round her. Yet
she might, after all, not have worried; and the real climax was that he
himself, at all events, needn't. "You'll never find out."

CHAPTER III

It was all to have made, none the less, as I have said, a date; which
came out in the fact that again and again, even after long intervals,
other things that passed between them were in relation to this hour but
the character of recalls and results. Its immediate effect had been
indeed rather to lighten insistence--almost to provoke a reaction; as if
their topic had dropped by its own weight and as if moreover, for that
matter, Marcher had been visited by one of his occasional warnings
against egotism. He had kept up, he felt, and very decently on the
whole, his consciousness of the importance of not being selfish, and it
was true that he had never sinned in that direction without promptly
enough trying to press the scales the other way. He often repaired his
fault, the season permitting, by inviting his friend to accompany him to
the opera; and it not infrequently thus happened that, to show he didn't
wish her to have but one sort of food for her mind, he was the cause of
her appearing there with him a dozen nights in the month. It even
happened that, seeing her home at such times, he occasionally went in
with her to finish, as he called it, the evening, and, the better to make
his point, sat down to the frugal but always careful little supper that
awaited his pleasure. His point was made, he thought, by his not
eternally insisting with her on himself; made for instance, at such
hours, when it befell that, her piano at hand and each of them familiar
with it, they went over passages of the opera together. It chanced to be
on one of these occasions, however, that he reminded her of her not
having answered a certain question he had put to her during the talk that
had taken place between