It was impossible he shouldn't take to himself that she was really interested, though it all kept coming as a perfect surprise. He had thought of himself so long as abominably alone, and lo he wasn't alone a bit. He hadn't been, it appeared, for an hour--since those moments on the Sorrento boat. It was she who had been, he seemed to see as he looked at her--she who had been made so by the graceless fact of his lapse of fidelity. To tell her what he had told her--what had it been but to ask something of her? something that she had given, in her charity, without his having, by a remembrance, by a return of the spirit, failing another encounter, so much as thanked her. What he had asked of her had been simply at first not to laugh at him. She had beautifully not done so for ten years, and she was not doing so now. So he had endless gratitude to make up. Only for that he must see just how he had figured to her. "What, exactly, was the account I gave--?" "Of the way you did feel? Well, it was very simple. You said you had had from your earliest time, as the deepest thing within you, the sense of being kept for something rare and strange, possibly prodigious and terrible, that was sooner or later to happen to you, that you had in your bones the foreboding and the conviction of, and that would perhaps overwhelm you." "Do you call that very simple?" John Marcher asked. She thought a moment. "It was perhaps because I seemed, as you spoke, to understand it." "You do understand it?" he eagerly asked. Again she kept her kind eyes on him. "You still have the belief?" "Oh!" he exclaimed helplessly. There was too much to say. "Whatever it's to be," she clearly made out, "it hasn't yet come." He shook his head in complete surrender now. "It hasn't yet come. Only, you know, it isn't anything I'm to do, to achieve in the world, to be distinguished or admired for. I'm not such an ass as _that_. It would be much better, no doubt, if I were." "It's to be something you're merely to suffer?" "Well, say to wait for--to have to meet, to face, to see suddenly break out in my life; possibly destroying all further consciousness, possibly annihilating me; possibly, on the other hand, only altering everything, striking at the root of all my world and leaving me to the consequences, however they shape themselves." She took this in, but the light in her eyes continued for him not to be that of mockery. "Isn't what you describe perhaps but the expectation--or at any rate the sense of danger, familiar to so many people--of falling in love?" John Marcher thought. "Did you ask me that before?" "No--I wasn't so free-and-easy then. But it's what strikes me now." "Of course," he said after a moment, "it strikes you. Of course it strikes _me_. Of course what's in store for me may be no more than that. The only thing is," he went on, "that I think if it had been that I should by this time know."