me of old that
I couldn't quite make up my mind. I thought of dreadful things, between
which it was difficult to choose; and so must you have done."

"Rather! I feel now as if I had scarce done anything else. I appear to
myself to have spent my life in thinking of nothing but dreadful things.
A great many of them I've at different times named to you, but there were
others I couldn't name."

"They were too, too dreadful?"

"Too, too dreadful--some of them."

She looked at him a minute, and there came to him as he met it, an
inconsequent sense that her eyes, when one got their full clearness, were
still as beautiful as they had been in youth, only beautiful with a
strange cold light--a light that somehow was a part of the effect, if it
wasn't rather a part of the cause, of the pale hard sweetness of the
season and the hour. "And yet," she said at last, "there are horrors
we've mentioned."

It deepened the strangeness to see her, as such a figure in such a
picture, talk of "horrors," but she was to do in a few minutes something
stranger yet--though even of this he was to take the full measure but
afterwards--and the note of it already trembled. It was, for the matter
of that, one of the signs that her eyes were having again the high
flicker of their prime. He had to admit, however, what she said. "Oh
yes, there were times when we did go far." He caught himself in the act
of speaking as if it all were over. Well, he wished it were; and the
consummation depended for him clearly more and more on his friend.

But she had now a soft smile. "Oh far--!"

It was oddly ironic. "Do you mean you're prepared to go further?"

She was frail and ancient and charming as she continued to look at him,
yet it was rather as if she had lost the thread. "Do you consider that
we went far?"

"Why I thought it the point you were just making--that we _had_ looked
most things in the face."

"Including each other?" She still smiled. "But you're quite right.
We've had together great imaginations, often great fears; but some of
them have been unspoken."

"Then the worst--we haven't faced that. I _could_ face it, I believe, if
I knew what you think it. I feel," he explained, "as if I had lost my
power to conceive such things." And he wondered if he looked as blank as
he sounded. "It's spent."

"Then why do you assume," she asked, "that mine isn't?"

"Because you've given me signs to the contrary. It isn't a question f