It sounded too foolish
and too flat; the difference for him in this particular, the
extinction in his life of the element of suspense, was such as in
fact to surprise him. He could scarce have said what the effect
resembled; the abrupt cessation, the positive prohibition, of music
perhaps, more than anything else, in some place all adjusted and
all accustomed to sonority and to attention. If he could at any
rate have conceived lifting the veil from his image at some moment
of the past (what had he done, after all, if not lift it to HER?)
so to do this to-day, to talk to people at large of the Jungle
cleared and confide to them that he now felt it as safe, would have
been not only to see them listen as to a goodwife's tale, but
really to hear himself tell one. What it presently came to in
truth was that poor Marcher waded through his beaten grass, where
no life stirred, where no breath sounded, where no evil eye seemed
to gleam from a possible lair, very much as if vaguely looking for
the Beast, and still more as if acutely missing it. He walked
about in an existence that had grown strangely more spacious, and,
stopping fitfully in places where the undergrowth of life struck
him as closer, asked himself yearningly, wondered secretly and
sorely, if it would have lurked here or there.
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