THE BETTER SORT
combat his yearning. She after all told him nothing but that his light had failed—which he knew well enough without her. "Before———?" he blankly echoed.
"Before, you see, it was always to come. That kept it present."
"Oh, I don't care what comes now! Besides," Marcher added, "it seems to me I liked it better present, as you say, than I can like it absent with your absence."
"Oh, mine!"—and her pale hands made light of it.
"With the absence of everything." He had a dreadful sense of standing there before her for—so far as anything but this proved, this bottomless drop was concerned—the last time of their life. It rested on him with a weight he felt he could scarce bear, and this weight it apparently was that still pressed out what remained in him of speakable protest. "I believe you; but I can't begin to pretend I understand. Nothing, for me, is past; nothing will pass until I pass myself, which I pray my stars may be as soon as possible. Say, however," he added, "that I've eaten my cake, as you contend, to the last crumb—how can the thing I've never felt at all be the thing I was marked out to feel?"
She met him, perhaps, less directly, but she met him unperturbed. "You take your 'feelings' for granted. You were to suffer your fate. That was not necessarily to know it."
"How in the world—when what is such knowledge but suffering?"
She looked up at him a while, in silence. "No—you don't understand."
"I suffer," said John Marcher.
"Don't, don't!"
"How can I help at least that?"
"Don't!" May Bartram repeated.
232
