them on her last birthday. "What is it that
saves _you_?"--saved her, he meant, from that appearance of variation
from the usual human type. If he had practically escaped remark, as she
pretended, by doing, in the most important particular, what most men
do--find the answer to life in patching up an alliance of a sort with a
woman no better than himself--how had she escaped it, and how could the
alliance, such as it was, since they must suppose it had been more or
less noticed, have failed to make her rather positively talked about?

"I never said," May Bartram replied, "that it hadn't made me a good deal
talked about."

"Ah well then you're not 'saved.'"

"It hasn't been a question for me. If you've had your woman I've had,"
she said, "my man."

"And you mean that makes you all right?"

Oh it was always as if there were so much to say!

"I don't know why it shouldn't make me--humanly, which is what we're
speaking of--as right as it makes you."

"I see," Marcher returned. "'Humanly,' no doubt, as showing that you're
living for something. Not, that is, just for me and my secret."

May Bartram smiled. "I don't pretend it exactly shows that I'm not
living for you. It's my intimacy with you that's in question."

He laughed as he saw what she meant. "Yes, but since, as you say, I'm
only, so far as people make out, ordinary, you're--aren't you? no more
than ordinary either. You help me to pass for a man like another. So if
I _am_, as I understand you, you're not compromised. Is that it?"

She had another of her waits, but she spoke clearly enough. "That's it.
It's all that concerns me--to help you to pass for a man like another."

He was careful to acknowledge the remark handsomely. "How kind, how
beautiful, you are to me! How shall I ever repay you?"

She had her last grave pause, as if there might be a choice of ways. But
she chose. "By going on as you are."

It was into this going on as he was that they relapsed, and really for so
long a time that the day inevitably came for a further sounding of their
depths. These depths, constantly bridged over by a structure firm enough
in spite of its lightness and of its occasional oscillation in the
somewhat vertiginous air, invited on occasion, in the interest of their
nerves, a dropping of the plummet and a measurement of the abyss. A
difference had been made moreover, once for all, by the fact that she had
all the while not appeared to feel the nee