yet
known on the low stone table that bore May Bartram's name. He rested
without power to move, as if some spring in him, some spell vouchsafed,
had suddenly been broken for ever. If he could have done that moment as
he wanted he would simply have stretched himself on the slab that was
ready to take him, treating it as a place prepared to receive his last
sleep. What in all the wide world had he now to keep awake for? He
stared before him with the question, and it was then that, as one of the
cemetery walks passed near him, he caught the shock of the face.

His neighbour at the other grave had withdrawn, as he himself, with force
enough in him, would have done by now, and was advancing along the path
on his way to one of the gates. This brought him close, and his pace,
was slow, so that--and all the more as there was a kind of hunger in his
look--the two men were for a minute directly confronted. Marcher knew
him at once for one of the deeply stricken--a perception so sharp that
nothing else in the picture comparatively lived, neither his dress, his
age, nor his presumable character and class; nothing lived but the deep
ravage of the features that he showed. He _showed_ them--that was the
point; he was moved, as he passed, by some impulse that was either a
signal for sympathy or, more possibly, a challenge to an opposed sorrow.
He might already have been aware of our friend, might at some previous
hour have noticed in him the smooth habit of the scene, with which the
state of his own senses so scantly consorted, and might thereby have been
stirred as by an overt discord. What Marcher was at all events conscious
of was in the first place that the image of scarred passion presented to
him was conscious too--of something that profaned the air; and in the
second that, roused, startled, shocked, he was yet the next moment
looking after it, as it went, with envy. The most extraordinary thing
that had happened to him--though he had given that name to other matters
as well--took place, after his immediate vague stare, as a consequence of
this impression. The stranger passed, but the raw glare of his grief
remained, making our friend wonder in pity what wrong, what wound it
expressed, what injury not to be healed. What had the man _had_, to make
him by the loss of it so bleed and yet live?

Something--and this reached him with a pang--that _he_, John Marcher,
hadn't; the proof of which was precisely John Marcher's ari