stain, though
not exempt from a slight droop and a complexity of faint creases, under
some clear glass bell. The perfection of household care, of high polish
and finish, always reigned in her rooms, but they now looked most as if
everything had been wound up, tucked in, put away, so that she might sit
with folded hands and with nothing more to do. She was "out of it," to
Marcher's vision; her work was over; she communicated with him as across
some gulf or from some island of rest that she had already reached, and
it made him feel strangely abandoned. Was it--or rather wasn't it--that
if for so long she had been watching with him the answer to their
question must have swum into her ken and taken on its name, so that her
occupation was verily gone? He had as much as charged her with this in
saying to her, many months before, that she even then knew something she
was keeping from him. It was a point he had never since ventured to
press, vaguely fearing as he did that it might become a difference,
perhaps a disagreement, between them. He had in this later time turned
nervous, which was what he in all the other years had never been; and the
oddity was that his nervousness should have waited till he had begun to
doubt, should have held off so long as he was sure. There was something,
it seemed to him, that the wrong word would bring down on his head,
something that would so at least ease off his tension. But he wanted not
to speak the wrong word; that would make everything ugly. He wanted the
knowledge he lacked to drop on him, if drop it could, by its own august
weight. If she was to forsake him it was surely for her to take leave.
This was why he didn't directly ask her again what she knew; but it was
also why, approaching the matter from another side, he said to her in the
course of his visit: "What do you regard as the very worst that at this
time of day _can_ happen to me?"

He had asked her that in the past often enough; they had, with the odd
irregular rhythm of their intensities and avoidances, exchanged ideas
about it and then had seen the ideas washed away by cool intervals,
washed like figures traced in sea-sand. It had ever been the mark of
their talk that the oldest allusions in it required but a little
dismissal and reaction to come out again, sounding for the hour as new.
She could thus at present meet his enquiry quite freshly and patiently.
"Oh yes, I've repeatedly thought, only it always seemed to