failing another encounter, so much as thanked her. What he had asked of
her had been simply at first not to laugh at him. She had beautifully
not done so for ten years, and she was not doing so now. So he had
endless gratitude to make up. Only for that he must see just how he had
figured to her. "What, exactly, was the account I gave--?"

"Of the way you did feel? Well, it was very simple. You said you had
had from your earliest time, as the deepest thing within you, the sense
of being kept for something rare and strange, possibly prodigious and
terrible, that was sooner or later to happen to you, that you had in your
bones the foreboding and the conviction of, and that would perhaps
overwhelm you."

"Do you call that very simple?" John Marcher asked.

She thought a moment. "It was perhaps because I seemed, as you spoke, to
understand it."

"You do understand it?" he eagerly asked.

Again she kept her kind eyes on him. "You still have the belief?"

"Oh!" he exclaimed helplessly. There was too much to say.

"Whatever it's to be," she clearly made out, "it hasn't yet come."

He shook his head in complete surrender now. "It hasn't yet come. Only,
you know, it isn't anything I'm to do, to achieve in the world, to be
distinguished or admired for. I'm not such an ass as _that_. It would
be much better, no doubt, if I were."