d of rebutting his charge of an
idea within her that she didn't dare to express--a charge uttered just
before one of the fullest of their later discussions ended. It had come
up for him then that she "knew" something and that what she knew was
bad--too bad to tell him. When he had spoken of it as visibly so bad
that she was afraid he might find it out, her reply had left the matter
too equivocal to be let alone and yet, for Marcher's special sensibility,
almost too formidable again to touch. He circled about it at a distance
that alternately narrowed and widened and that still wasn't much affected
by the consciousness in him that there was nothing she could "know,"
after all, any better than he did. She had no source of knowledge he
hadn't equally--except of course that she might have finer nerves. That
was what women had where they were interested; they made out things,
where people were concerned, that the people often couldn't have made out
for themselves. Their nerves, their sensibility, their imagination, were
conductors and revealers, and the beauty of May Bartram was in particular
that she had given herself so to his case. He felt in these days what,
oddly enough, he had never felt before, the growth of a dread of losing
her by some catastrophe--some catastrophe that yet wouldn't at all be the
catastrophe: partly because she had almost of a sudden begun to strike
him as more useful to him than ever yet, and partly by reason of an
appearance of uncertainty in her health, co-incident and equally new. It
was characteristic of the inner detachment he had hitherto so
successfully cultivated and to which our whole account of him is a
reference, it was characteristic that his complications, such as they
were, had never yet seemed so as at this crisis to thicken about him,
even to the point of making him ask himself if he were, by any chance, of
a truth, within sight or sound, within touch or reach, within the
immediate jurisdiction, of the thing that waited.

When the day came, as come it had to, that his friend confessed to him
her fear of a deep disorder in her blood, he felt somehow the shadow of a
change and the chill of a shock. He immediately began to imagine
aggravations and disasters, and above all to think of her peril as the
direct menace for himself of personal privation. This indeed gave him
one of those partial recoveries of equanimity that were agreeable to
him--it showed him that what was still f