ur gentleman this was marked,
quite as marked as that the fortunate cause of it was just the buried
treasure of her knowledge. He had with his own hands dug up this little
hoard, brought to light--that is to within reach of the dim day
constituted by their discretions and privacies--the object of value the
hiding-place of which he had, after putting it into the ground himself,
so strangely, so long forgotten. The rare luck of his having again just
stumbled on the spot made him indifferent to any other question; he would
doubtless have devoted more time to the odd accident of his lapse of
memory if he hadn't been moved to devote so much to the sweetness, the
comfort, as he felt, for the future, that this accident itself had helped
to keep fresh. It had never entered into his plan that any one should
"know", and mainly for the reason that it wasn't in him to tell any one.
That would have been impossible, for nothing but the amusement of a cold
world would have waited on it. Since, however, a mysterious fate had
opened his mouth betimes, in spite of him, he would count that a
compensation and profit by it to the utmost. That the right person
_should_ know tempered the asperity of his secret more even than his
shyness had permitted him to imagine; and May Bartram was clearly right,
because--well, because there she was. Her knowledge simply settled it;
he would have been sure enough by this time had she been wrong. There
was that in his situation, no doubt, that disposed him too much to see
her as a mere confidant, taking all her light for him from the fact--the
fact only--of her interest in his predicament; from her mercy, sympathy,
seriousness, her consent not to regard him as the funniest of the funny.
Aware, in fine, that her price for him was just in her giving him this
constant sense of his being admirably spared, he was careful to remember
that she had also a life of her own, with things that might happen to
_her_, things that in friendship one should likewise take account of.
Something fairly remarkable came to pass with him, for that matter, in
this connexion--something represented by a certain passage of his
consciousness, in the suddenest way, from one extreme to the other.

He had thought himself, so long as nobody knew, the most disinterested
person in the world, carrying his concentrated burden, his perpetual
suspense, ever so quietly, holding his tongue about it, giving others no
glimpse of it nor of its