nothing for the danger, that the solemnity of
the occasion, largely made up of persons who had known them both and had
a sense of the long joke, would sufficiently deprive his presence of all
light association. On the question of what had happened the evening
of her death little more passed between us; I had been overtaken by a
horror of the element of evidence. It seemed gross and prying on either
hypothesis. He, on his side, had none to produce, none at least but a
statement of his house-porter--on his own admission a most casual
and intermittent personage--that between the hours of ten o'clock and
midnight no less than three ladies in deep black had flitted in and out
of the place. This proved far too much; we had neither of us any use for
three. He knew that I considered I had accounted for every fragment
of her time, and we dropped the matter as settled; we abstained from
further discussion. What I knew however was that he abstained to please
me rather than because he yielded to my reasons. He didn't yield--he
was only indulgent; he clung to his interpretation because he liked it
better. He liked it better, I held, because it had more to say to his
vanity. That, in a similar position, would not have been its effect
on me, though I had doubtless quite as much; but these are things of
individual humour, as to which no person can judge for another. I should
have supposed it more gratifying to be the subject of one of those
inexplicable occurrences that are chronicled in thrilling books and
disputed about at learned meetings; I could conceive, on the part of
a being just engulfed in the infinite and still vibrating with human
emotion, of nothing more fine and pure, more high and august than such
an impulse of reparation, of admonition or even of curiosity. _That_ was
beautiful, if one would, and I should in his place have thought more of
myself for being so distinguished. It was public that he had already,
that he had long been distinguished, and what was this in itself but
almost a proof? Each of the strange visitations contributed to establish
the other. He had a different feeling; but he had also, I hasten to add,
an unmistakable desire not to make a stand or, as they say, a fuss about
it. I might believe what I liked--the more so that the whole thing was
in a manner a mystery of my producing. It was an event of my history, a
puzzle of my consciousness, not of his; therefore he would take about it
any tone that struc