eemed to
feel himself unattended--and for a reason he couldn't seize--by the
distinction, the dignity, the propriety, if nothing else, of the man
markedly bereaved. It was as if, in the view of society he had not
_been_ markedly bereaved, as if there still failed some sign or proof of
it, and as if none the less his character could never be affirmed nor the
deficiency ever made up. There were moments as the weeks went by when he
would have liked, by some almost aggressive act, to take his stand on the
intimacy of his loss, in order that it _might_ be questioned and his
retort, to the relief of his spirit, so recorded; but the moments of an
irritation more helpless followed fast on these, the moments during
which, turning things over with a good conscience but with a bare
horizon, he found himself wondering if he oughtn't to have begun, so to
speak, further back.

He found himself wondering indeed at many things, and this last
speculation had others to keep it company. What could he have done,
after all, in her lifetime, without giving them both, as it were, away?
He couldn't have made known she was watching him, for that would have
published the superstition of the Beast. This was what closed his mouth
now--now that the Jungle had been thrashed to vacancy and that the Beast
had stolen away. It sounded too foolish and too flat; the difference for
him in this particular, the extinction in his life of the element of
suspense, was such as in fact to surprise him. He could scarce have said
what the effect resembled; the abrupt cessation, the positive
prohibition, of music perhaps, more than anything else, in some place all
adjusted and all accustomed to sonority and to attention. If he could at
any rate have conceived lifting the veil from his image at some moment of
the past (what had he done, after all, if not lift it to _her_?) so to do
this to-day, to talk to people at large of the Jungle cleared and confide
to them that he now felt it as safe, would have been not only to see them
listen as to a goodwife's tale, but really to hear himself tell one. What
it presently came to in truth was that poor Marcher waded through his
beaten grass, where no life stirred, where no breath sounded, where no
evil eye seemed to gleam from a possible lair, very much as if vaguely
looking for the Beast, and still more as if acutely missing it. He
walked about in an existence that had grown strangely more spacious, and,
stopping fit