itself, almost no margin left.  Since it was in Time that he was to have met his fate, so it was in Time that his fate was to have acted; and as he waked up to the sense of no longer being young, which was exactly the sense of being stale, just as that, in turn, was the sense of being weak, he waked up to another matter beside.  It all hung together; they were subject, he and the great vagueness, to an equal and indivisible law.  When the possibilities themselves had accordingly turned stale, when the secret of the gods had grown faint, had perhaps even quite evaporated, that, and that only, was failure.  It wouldn’t have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything.  And so, in the dark valley into which his path had taken its unlooked-for twist, he wondered not a little as he groped.  He didn’t care what awful crash might overtake him, with what ignominy or what monstrosity he might yet he associated—­since he wasn’t after all too utterly old to suffer—­if it would only be decently proportionate to the posture he had kept, all his life, in the threatened presence of it.  He had but one desire left—­that he shouldn’t have been “sold.”

CHAPTER IV

Then it was that, one afternoon, while the spring of the year was young and new she met all in her own way his frankest betrayal of these alarms.  He had gone in late to see her, but evening hadn’t settled and she was presented to him in that long fresh light of waning April days which affects us often with a sadness sharper than the greyest hours of autumn.  The week had been warm, the spring was supposed to have begun early, and May Bartram sat, for the first time in the year, without a fire; a fact that, to Marcher’s sense, gave the scene of which she formed part a smooth and ultimate look, an air of knowing, in its immaculate order and cold meaningless cheer, that it would never see a fire again.  Her own aspect—­he could scarce have said why—­intensified this note.  Almost as white as wax, with the marks and signs in her face as numerous and as fine as if they had been etched by a needle, with soft white draperies relieved by a faded green scarf on the delicate tone of which the years had further refined, she was the picture of a serene and exquisite but impenetrable sphinx, whose head, or indeed all whose person, might have been powdered with silver.  She was a sphinx, yet with her white petals and green fronds she might have been a lily too—­only an artificial lily, wonderfully imitated and constantly kept, without dust or stain, though not exempt from a slight droop and a complexity of faint creases, under some clear glass bell.  The perfection of household care, of high polish and finish, always reigned in her rooms, but they now looked most as if everything had been wound up, tucked in, put away, so that she might sit with folded hands and with nothing more to do.  She was “out