asn't touched me--?"

"Ah your not being aware of it"--and she seemed to hesitate an instant to
deal with this--"your not being aware of it is the strangeness in the
strangeness. It's the wonder _of_ the wonder." She spoke as with the
softness almost of a sick child, yet now at last, at the end of all, with
the perfect straightness of a sibyl. She visibly knew that she knew, and
the effect on him was of something co-ordinate, in its high character,
with the law that had ruled him. It was the true voice of the law; so on
her lips would the law itself have sounded. "It _has_ touched you," she
went on. "It has done its office. It has made you all its own."

"So utterly without my knowing it?"

"So utterly without your knowing it." His hand, as he leaned to her, was
on the arm of her chair, and, dimly smiling always now, she placed her
own on it. "It's enough if _I_ know it."

"Oh!" he confusedly breathed, as she herself of late so often had done.

"What I long ago said is true. You'll never know now, and I think you
ought to be content. You've _had_ it," said May Bartram.

"But had what?"

"Why what was to have marked you out. The proof of your law. It has
acted. I'm too glad," she then bravely added, "to have been able to see
what it's _not_."

He continued to attach his eyes to her, and with the sense that it was
all beyond him, and that _she_ was too, he would still have sharply
challenged her hadn't he so felt it an abuse of her weakness to do more
than take devoutly what she gave him, take it hushed as to a revelation.
If he did speak, it was out of the foreknowledge of his loneliness to
come. "If you're glad of what it's 'not' it might then have been worse?"

She turned her eyes away, she looked straight before her; with which
after a moment: "Well, you know our fears."

He wondered. "It's something then we never feared?"

On this slowly she turned to him. "Did we ever dream, with all our
dreams, that we should sit and talk of it thus?"

He tried for a little to make out that they had; but it was as if their
dreams, numberless enough, were in solution in some thick cold mist
through which thought lost itself. "It might have been that we couldn't
talk."

"Well"--she did her best for him--"not from this side. This, you see,"
she said, "is the _other_ side."

"I think," poor Marcher returned, "that all sides are the same to me."
Then, however, as she gently shook her head in correction