She had for the time no answer to this question. "There have been days
when I thought you were. Only, of course," she added, "there have been
days when we have thought almost anything."

"Everything. Oh!" Marcher softly groaned, as with a gasp, half spent, at
the face, more uncovered just then than it had been for a long while, of
the imagination always with them. It had always had it's incalculable
moments of glaring out, quite as with the very eyes of the very Beast,
and, used as he was to them, they could still draw from him the tribute
of a sigh that rose from the depths of his being. All they had thought,
first and last, rolled over him; the past seemed to have been reduced to
mere barren speculation. This in fact was what the place had just struck
him as so full of--the simplification of everything but the state of
suspense. That remained only by seeming to hang in the void surrounding
it. Even his original fear, if fear it as had been, had lost itself in
the desert. "I judge, however," he continued, "that you see I'm not
afraid now."

"What I see, as I make it out, is that you've achieved something almost
unprecedented in the way of getting used to danger. Living with it so
long and so closely you've lost your sense of it; you know it's there,
but you're indifferent, and you cease even, as of old, to have to whistle
in the dark. Considering what the danger is," May Bartram wound up, "I'm
bound to say I don't think your attitude could well be surpassed."

John Marcher faintly smiled. "It's heroic?"

"Certainly--call it that."

It was what he would have liked indeed to call it. "I _am_ then a man of