han't have been a bigger idiot than I can bear to know?
I _haven't_ lived with a vain imagination, in the most besotted illusion?
I haven't waited but to see the door shut in my face?"

She shook her head again. "However the case stands _that_ isn't the
truth. Whatever the reality, it _is_ a reality. The door isn't shut.
The door's open," said May Bartram.

"Then something's to come?"

She waited once again, always with her cold sweet eyes on him. "It's
never too late." She had, with her gliding step, diminished the distance
between them, and she stood nearer to him, close to him, a minute, as if
still charged with the unspoken. Her movement might have been for some
finer emphasis of what she was at once hesitating and deciding to say. He
had been standing by the chimney-piece, fireless and sparely adorned, a
small perfect old French clock and two morsels of rosy Dresden
constituting all its furniture; and her hand grasped the shelf while she
kept him waiting, grasped it a little as for support and encouragement.
She only kept him waiting, however; that is he only waited. It had
become suddenly, from her movement and attitude, beautiful and vivid to
him that she had something more to give him; her wasted face delicately
shone with it--it glittered almost as with the white lustre of silver in
her expression. She was right, incontestably, for what he saw in her
face was the truth, and strangely, without consequence, while their talk
of it as dreadful was still in the air, she appeared to present it as
inordinately soft. This, prompting bewilderment, made him but gape the
more gratefully for her revelation, so that they continued for some
minutes silent, her face shining at him, her contact imponderably
pressing, and his stare all kind but all expectant. The end, none the
less, was that what he had expected failed to come to him. Something
else took place instead, which seemed to consist at first in the mere
closing of her eyes. She gave way at the same instant to a slow fine
shudder, and though he remained staring--though he stared in fact but the
harder--turned off and regained her chair. It was the end of what she
had been intending, but it left him thinking only of that.

"Well, you don't say--?"

She had touched in her passage a bell near the chimney and had sunk back
strangely pale. "I'm afraid I'm too ill."

"Too ill to tell me?" it sprang up sharp to him, and almost to his lips,
the fear she mi