herself might suffer. "What if she should have to die before knowing,
before seeing--?" It would have been brutal, in the early stages of her
trouble, to put that question to her; but it had immediately sounded for
him to his own concern, and the possibility was what most made him sorry
for her. If she did "know," moreover, in the sense of her having had
some--what should he think?--mystical irresistible light, this would make
the matter not better, but worse, inasmuch as her original adoption of
his own curiosity had quite become the basis of her life. She had been
living to see what would _be_ to be seen, and it would quite lacerate her
to have to give up before the accomplishment of the vision. These
reflexions, as I say, quickened his generosity; yet, make them as he
might, he saw himself, with the lapse of the period, more and more
disconcerted. It lapsed for him with a strange steady sweep, and the
oddest oddity was that it gave him, independently of the threat of much
inconvenience, almost the only positive surprise his career, if career it
could be called, had yet offered him. She kept the house as she had
never done; he had to go to her to see her--she could meet him nowhere
now, though there was scarce a corner of their loved old London in which
she hadn't in the past, at one time or another, done so; and he found her
always seated by her fire in the deep old-fashioned chair she was less
and less able to leave. He had been struck one day, after an absence
exceeding his usual measure, with her suddenly looking much older to him
than he had ever thought of her being; then he recognised that the
suddenness was all on his side--he had just simply and suddenly noticed.
She looked older because inevitably, after so many years, she _was_ old,
or almost; which was of course true in still greater measure of her
companion. If she was old, or almost, John Marcher assuredly was, and
yet it was her showing of the lesson, not his own, that brought the truth
home to him. His surprises began here; when once they had begun they
multiplied; they came rather with a rush: it was as if, in the oddest way