d her, and she passed out."

"Was she rapid--slow?"

"Rather quick. But looking behind her," he added, with a smile. "I let
her go, for I perfectly understood that I was to take it as she wished."

I was conscious of exhaling a long, vague sigh. "Well, you must take it
now as _I_ wish--you must let _me_ go."

At this he drew near me again, detaining and persuading me, declaring
with all due gallantry that I was a very different matter. I would have
given anything to have been able to ask him if he had touched her, but
the words refused to form themselves: I knew well enough how horrid and
vulgar they would sound. I said something else--I forget exactly what;
it was feebly tortuous, and intended to make him tell me without my
putting the question. But he didn't tell me; he only repeated, as if
from a glimpse of the propriety of soothing and consoling me, the sense
of his declaration of some minutes before--the assurance that she was
indeed exquisite, as I had always insisted, but that I was his "real"
friend and his very own for ever. This led me to reassert, in the spirit
of my previous rejoinder, that I had at least the merit of being alive;
which in turn drew from him again the flash of contradiction I dreaded.
"Oh, _she_ was alive! she was, she was!"

"She was dead! she was dead!" I asseverated with an energy, a
determination that it should be so, which comes back to me now almost as
grotesque. But the sound of the word, as it rang out, filled me suddenly
with horror, and all the natural emotion the meaning of it might have
evoked in other conditions gathered and broke in a flood. It rolled over
me that here was a great affection quenched, and how much I had loved
and trusted her. I had a vision at the same time of the lonely beauty of
her end. "She's gone--she's lost to us for ever!" I burst into sobs.

"That's exactly what I feel," he exclaimed, speaking with extreme
kindness and pressing me to him for comfort. "She's gone; she's lost to
us for ever: so what does it matter now?" He bent over me, and when his
face had touched mine I scarcely knew if it were wet with my tears or
with his own.

VII

It was my theory, my conviction, it became, as I may say, my attitude,
that they had still never "met;" and it was just on this ground that I
said to myself it would be generous to ask him to stand with me beside
her grave. He did so, very modestly and tenderly, and I assumed, though
he himself clearly cared