tification that was the next
moment of a sudden to give way. Her words, if they meant something,
affected him in this light--the light also of her wasted face--as meaning
_all_, and the sense of what knowledge had been for herself came over him
with a rush which broke through into a question. "Is it of that then
you're dying?"

She but watched him, gravely at first, as to see, with this, where he
was, and she might have seen something or feared something that moved her
sympathy. "I would live for you still--if I could." Her eyes closed for
a little, as if, withdrawn into herself, she were for a last time trying.
"But I can't!" she said as she raised them again to take leave of him.

She couldn't indeed, as but too promptly and sharply appeared, and he had
no vision of her after this that was anything but darkness and doom. They
had parted for ever in that strange talk; access to her chamber of pain,
rigidly guarded, was almost wholly forbidden him; he was feeling now
moreover, in the face of doctors, nurses, the two or three relatives
attracted doubtless by the presumption of what she had to "leave," how
few were the rights, as they were called in such cases, that he had to
put forward, and how odd it might even seem that their intimacy shouldn't
have given him more of them. The stupidest fourth cousin had more, even
though she had been nothing in such a person's life. She had been a
feature of features in _his_, for what else was it to have been so
indispensable? Strange beyond saying were the ways of existence,
baffling for him the anomaly of his lack, as he felt it to be, of
producible claim. A woman might have been, as it were, everything to
him, and it might yet present him, in no connexion that any one seemed
held to recognise. If this was the case in these closing weeks it was
the case more sharply on the occasion of the last offices rendered, in
the great grey London cemetery, to what had been mortal, to what had been
precious, in his friend. The concourse at her grave was not numerous,
but he saw himself treated as scarce more nearly concerned with it than
if there had been a thousand others. He was in short from this moment
face to face with the fact that he was to profit extraordinarily little
by the interest May Bartram had taken in him. He couldn't quite have
said what he expected, but he hadn't surely expected this approach to a
double privation. Not only had her interest failed him, but he s