: "We mightn't,
as it were, have got across--?"

"To where we are--no. We're _here_"--she made her weak emphasis.

"And much good does it do us!" was her friend's frank comment.

"It does us the good it can. It does us the good that _it_ isn't here.
It's past. It's behind," said May Bartram. "Before--" but her voice
dropped.

He had got up, not to tire her, but it was hard to combat his yearning.
She after all told him nothing but that his light had failed--which he
knew well enough without her. "Before--?" he blankly echoed.

"Before you see, it was always to _come_. That kept it present."

"Oh I don't care what comes now! Besides," Marcher added, "it seems to
me I liked it better present, as you say, than I can like it absent with
_your_ absence."

"Oh mine!"--and her pale hands made light of it.

"With the absence of everything." He had a dreadful sense of standing
there before her for--so far as anything but this proved, this bottomless
drop was concerned--the last time of their life. It rested on him with a
weight he felt he could scarce bear, and this weight it apparently was
that still pressed out what remained in him of speakable protest. "I
believe you; but I can't begin to pretend I understand. _Nothing_, for
me, is past; nothing _will_ pass till I pass myself, which I pray my
stars may be as soon as possible. Say, however," he added, "that I've
eaten my cake, as you contend, to the last crumb--how can the thing I've
never felt at all be the thing I was marked out to feel?"

She met him perhaps less directly, but she met him unperturbed. "You
take your 'feelings' for granted. You were to suffer your fate. That
was not necessarily to know it."

"How in the world--when what is such knowledge but suffering?"

She looked up at him a while in silence. "No--you don't understand."

"I suffer," said John Marcher.

"Don't, don't!"

"How can I help at least _that_?"

"_Don't_!" May Bartram repeated.

She spoke it in a tone so special, in spite of her weakness, that he
stared an instant--stared as if some light, hitherto hidden, had
shimmered across his vision. Darkness again closed over it, but the
gleam had already become for him an idea. "Because I haven't the
right--?"

"Don't _know_--when you needn't," she mercifully urged. "You needn't--for
we shouldn't."

"Shouldn't?" If he could but know what she meant!

"No-- it's too much."

"Too much?" he still asked but with a mys