d take form now as
nothing more than his being condemned to see this charming woman, this
admirable friend, pass away from him. He had never so unreservedly
qualified her as while confronted in thought with such a possibility; in
spite of which there was small doubt for him that as an answer to his
long riddle the mere effacement of even so fine a feature of his
situation would be an abject anticlimax. It would represent, as
connected with his past attitude, a drop of dignity under the shadow of
which his existence could only become the most grotesques of failures. He
had been far from holding it a failure--long as he had waited for the
appearance that was to make it a success. He had waited for quite
another thing, not for such a thing as that. The breath of his good
faith came short, however, as he recognised how long he had waited, or
how long at least his companion had. That she, at all events, might be
recorded as having waited in vain--this affected him sharply, and all the
more because of his it first having done little more than amuse himself
with the idea. It grew more grave as the gravity of her condition grew,
and the state of mind it produced in him, which he himself ended by
watching as if it had been some definite disfigurement of his outer
person, may pass for another of his surprises. This conjoined itself
still with another, the really stupefying consciousness of a question
that he would have allowed to shape itself had he dared. What did
everything mean--what, that is, did _she_ mean, she and her vain waiting
and her probable death and the soundless admonition of it all--unless
that, at this time of day, it was simply, it was overwhelmingly too late?
He had never at any stage of his queer consciousness admitted the whisper
of such a correction; he had never till within these last few months been
so false to his conviction as not to hold that what was to come to him
had time, whether _he_ struck himself as having it or not. That at last,
at last, he certainly hadn't it, to speak of, or had it but in the
scantiest measure--such, soon enough, as things went with him, became the
inference with which his old obsession had to reckon: and this it was not
helped to do by the more and more confirmed appearance that the great
vagueness casting the long shadow in which he had lived had, to attest
itself, almost no margin left. Since it was in Time that he was to have
met his fate, so it was in Time that