ght die without giving him light. He checked himself in
time from so expressing his question, but she answered as if she had
heard the words.

"Don't you know--now?"

"'Now'--?" She had spoken as if some difference had been made within
the moment. But her maid, quickly obedient to her bell, was already with
them. "I know nothing." And he was afterwards to say to himself that he
must have spoken with odious impatience, such an impatience as to show
that, supremely disconcerted, he washed his hands of the whole question.

"Oh!" said May Bartram.

"Are you in pain?" he asked as the woman went to her.

"No," said May Bartram.

Her maid, who had put an arm round her as if to take her to her room,
fixed on him eyes that appealingly contradicted her; in spite of which,
however, he showed once more his mystification.

"What then has happened?"

She was once more, with her companion's help, on her feet, and, feeling
withdrawal imposed on him, he had blankly found his hat and gloves and
had reached the door. Yet he waited for her answer. "What _was_ to,"
she said.

CHAPTER V

He came back the next day, but she was then unable to see him, and as it
was literally the first time this had occurred in the long stretch of
their acquaintance he turned away, defeated and sore, almost angry--or
feeling at least that such a break in their custom was really the
beginning of the end--and wandered alone with his thoughts, especially
with the one he was least able to keep down. She was dying and he would
lose her; she was dying and his life would end. He stopped in the Park,
into which he had passed, and stared before him at his recurrent doubt.
Away from her the doubt pressed again; in her presence he had believed
her, but as he felt his forlornness he threw himself into the explanation
that, nearest at hand, had most of a miserable warmth for him and least
of a cold torment. She had deceived him to save him--to put him off with
something in which he should be able to rest. What could the thing that
was to happen to him be, after all, but just this thing that had began to
happen? Her dying, her death, his consequent solitude--that was what he
had figured as the Beast in the Jungle, that was what had been in the lap
of the gods. He had had her word for it as he left her--what else on
earth could she have meant? It wasn't a thing of a monstrous order; not
a fate rare and distinguished; not a stroke of fortune