en great, it would have
touched him to pain more than to pleasure. But the cold charm in her
eyes had spread, as she hovered before him, to all the rest of her
person, so that it was for the minute almost a recovery of youth. He
couldn't pity her for that; he could only take her as she showed--as
capable even yet of helping him. It was as if, at the same time, her
light might at any instant go out; wherefore he must make the most of it.
There passed before him with intensity the three or four things he wanted
most to know; but the question that came of itself to his lips really
covered the others. "Then tell me if I shall consciously suffer."

She promptly shook her head. "Never!"

It confirmed the authority he imputed to her, and it produced on him an
extraordinary effect. "Well, what's better than that? Do you call that
the worst?"

"You think nothing is better?" she asked.

She seemed to mean something so special that he again sharply wondered,
though still with the dawn of a prospect of relief. "Why not, if one
doesn't _know_?" After which, as their eyes, over his question, met in a
silence, the dawn deepened, and something to his purpose came
prodigiously out of her very face. His own, as he took it in, suddenly
flushed to the forehead, and he gasped with the force of a perception to
which, on the instant, everything fitted. The sound of his gasp filled
the air; then he became articulate. "I see--if I don't suffer!"

In her own look, however, was doubt. "You see what?"

"Why what you mean--what you've always meant."

She again shook her head. "What I mean isn't what I've always meant.
It's different."

"It's something new?"

She hung back from it a little. "Something new. It's not what you
think. I see what you think."

His divination drew breath then; only her correction might be wrong. "It
isn't that I _am_ a blockhead?" he asked between faintness and grimness.
"It isn't that it's all a mistake?"

"A mistake?" she pityingly echoed. _That_ possibility, for her, he saw,
would be monstrous; and if she guaranteed him the immunity from pain it
would accordingly not be what she had in mind. "Oh no," she declared;
"it's nothing of that sort. You've been right."

Yet he couldn't help asking himself if she weren't, thus pressed,
speaking but to save him. It seemed to him he should be most in a hole
if his history should prove all a platitude. "Are you telling me the
truth, so that I s