e to be
quite taken for granted that she knew all about it. And then when he had
asked how she knew--why she took so informed a tone about it; all on
the wonder of her seeming so much more "in" it just at that hour than
he himself quite felt he could figure for: "Ah, how but from the dear
lovely thing herself? Don't you suppose _she_ knows it?"

"Oh, she absolutely 'knows' it, does she?"--he fairly heard himself ask
that; and with the oddest sense at once of sharply wanting the certitude
and yet of seeing the question, of hearing himself say the words,
through several thicknesses of some wrong medium. He came back to it
from a distance; as he would have had to come back (this was again vivid
to him) should he have got round again to his ripe intention three days
before--after his now present but then absent friend, that is, had left
him planted before his now absent but then present one for the purpose.
"Do you mean she--at all confidently!--expects?" he went on, not much
minding if it couldn't but sound foolish; the time being given it for
him meanwhile by the sigh, the wondering gasp, all charged with the
unutterable, that the tone of his appeal set in motion. He saw his
companion look at him, but it might have been with the eyes of thirty
years ago; when--very likely.--he had put her some such question about
some girl long since dead. Dimly at first, then more distinctly, didn't
it surge back on him for the very strangeness that there had been some
such passage as this between them--yes, about Mary Cardew!--in the
autumn of '68?

"Why, don't you realise your situation?" Miss Rasch struck him as quite
beautifully wailing--above all to such an effect of deep interest, that
is, on her own part and in him.

"My situation?"--he echoed, he considered; but reminded afresh, by
the note of the detached, the far-projected in it, of what he had
last remembered of his sentient state on his once taking ether at the
dentist's.

"Yours and hers--the situation of her adoring you. I suppose you at
least know it," Cornelia smiled.

Yes, it was like the other time and yet it wasn't. She was like--poor
Cornelia was--everything that used to be; that somehow was most definite
to him. Still he could quite reply "Do you call it--her adoring me--_my_
situation?"

"Well, it's a part of yours, surely--if you're in love with her."

"Am I, ridiculous old person! in love with her?" White-Mason asked.

"I may be a ridiculous old person,"