"Why
not, if one doesn't KNOW?" After which, as their eyes, over his
question, met in a silence, the dawn deepened, and something to his
purpose came prodigiously out of her very face. His own, as he
took it in, suddenly flushed to the forehead, and he gasped with
the force of a perception to which, on the instant, everything
fitted. The sound of his gasp filled the air; then he became
articulate. "I see--if I don't suffer!"
In her own look, however, was doubt. "You see what?"
"Why what you mean--what you've always meant."
She again shook her head. "What I mean isn't what I've always
meant. It's different."
"It's something new?"
She hung back from it a little. "Something new. It's not what you
think. I see what you think."
His divination drew breath then; only her correction might be
wrong. "It isn't that I AM a blockhead?" he asked between
faintness and grimness. "It isn't that it's all a mistake?"
"A mistake?" she pityingly echoed. THAT possibility, for her, he
saw, would be monstrous; and if she guaranteed him the immunity
from pain it would accordingly not be what she had in mind.
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