also saw, made her sorry for him, as if her allusion had been a
mistake. It took him but a moment, however, to feel it hadn't been, much
as it had been a surprise. After the first little shock of it her
knowledge on the contrary began, even if rather strangely, to taste sweet
to him. She was the only other person in the world then who would have
it, and she had had it all these years, while the fact of his having so
breathed his secret had unaccountably faded from him. No wonder they
couldn't have met as if nothing had happened. "I judge," he finally
said, "that I know what you mean. Only I had strangely enough lost any
sense of having taken you so far into my confidence."

"Is it because you've taken so many others as well?"

"I've taken nobody. Not a creature since then."

"So that I'm the only person who knows?"

"The only person in the world."

"Well," she quickly replied, "I myself have never spoken. I've never,
never repeated of you what you told me." She looked at him so that he
perfectly believed her. Their eyes met over it in such a way that he was
without a doubt. "And I never will."

She spoke with an earnestness that, as if almost excessive, put him at
ease about her possible derision. Somehow the whole question was a new
luxury to him--that is from the moment she was in possession. If she
didn't take the sarcastic view she clearly took the sympathetic, and that
was what he had had, in all the long time, from no one whomsoever. What
he felt was that he couldn't at present have begun to tell her, and yet
could profit perhaps exquisitely by the accident of having done so of
old. "Please don't then. We're just right as it is."

"Oh I am," she laughed, "if you are!" To which she added: "Then you do
still feel in the same way?"

It was impossible he shouldn't take to himself that she was really
interested, though it all kept coming as a perfect surprise. He had
thought of himself so long as abominably alone, and lo he wasn't alone a
bit. He hadn't been, it appeared, for an hour--since those moments on
the Sorrento boat. It was she who had been, he seemed to see as he
looked at her--she who had been made so by the graceless fact of his
lapse of fidelity. To tell her what he had told her--what had it been
but to ask something of her? something that she had given, in her
charity, without his having, by a remembrance, by a return of the spirit,
failing another encounter, so much as thank