living for you. It's my intimacy with you that's in question."

He laughed as he saw what she meant. "Yes, but since, as you say, I'm
only, so far as people make out, ordinary, you're--aren't you? no more
than ordinary either. You help me to pass for a man like another. So if
I _am_, as I understand you, you're not compromised. Is that it?"

She had another of her waits, but she spoke clearly enough. "That's it.
It's all that concerns me--to help you to pass for a man like another."

He was careful to acknowledge the remark handsomely. "How kind, how
beautiful, you are to me! How shall I ever repay you?"

She had her last grave pause, as if there might be a choice of ways. But
she chose. "By going on as you are."

It was into this going on as he was that they relapsed, and really for so
long a time that the day inevitably came for a further sounding of their
depths. These depths, constantly bridged over by a structure firm enough
in spite of its lightness and of its occasional oscillation in the
somewhat vertiginous air, invited on occasion, in the interest of their
nerves, a dropping of the plummet and a measurement of the abyss. A
difference had been made moreover, once for all, by the fact that she had
all the while not appeared to feel the need of rebutting his charge of an
idea within her that she didn't dare to express--a charge uttered just
before one of the fullest of their later discussions ended. It had come
up for him then that she "knew" something and that what she knew was
bad--too bad to tell him. When he had spoken of it as visibly so bad
that she was afraid he might find it out, her reply had left the matter
too equivocal to be let alone and yet, for Marcher's special sensibility,