"Well," she said after another wait, "the matter with me is simply that
I'm more sure than ever my curiosity, as you call it, will be but too
well repaid."

They were frankly grave now; he had got up from his seat, had turned once
more about the little drawing-room to which, year after year, he brought
his inevitable topic; in which he had, as he might have said, tasted
their intimate community with every sauce, where every object was as
familiar to him as the things of his own house and the very carpets were
worn with his fitful walk very much as the desks in old counting-houses
are worn by the elbows of generations of clerks. The generations of his
nervous moods had been at work there, and the place was the written
history of his whole middle life. Under the impression of what his
friend had just said he knew himself, for some reason, more aware of
these things; which made him, after a moment, stop again before her. "Is
it possibly that you've grown afraid?"

"Afraid?" He thought, as she repeated the word, that his question had
made her, a little, change colour; so that, lest he should have touched
on a truth, he explained very kindly: "You remember that that was what
you asked _me_ long ago--that first day at Weatherend."

"Oh yes, and you told me you didn't know--that I was to see for myself.
We've said little about it since, even in so long a time."

"Precisely," Marcher interposed--"quite as if it were too delicate a
matter for us to make free with. Quite as if we might find, on pressure,
that I _am_ afraid. For then," he said, "we shouldn't, should we? quite
know what to do."