friends had taken him back there; he had achieved there again with Mss Bartram some quiet detachment; and he had in London succeeded in persuading her to more than one brief absence from her aunt.  They went together, on these latter occasions, to the National Gallery and the South Kensington Museum, where, among vivid reminders, they talked of Italy at large—­not now attempting to recover, as at first, the taste of their youth and their ignorance.  That recovery, the first day at Weatherend, had served its purpose well, had given them quite enough; so that they were, to Marcher’s sense, no longer hovering about the head-waters of their stream, but had felt their boat pushed sharply off and down the current.

They were literally afloat together; for our gentleman this was marked, quite as marked as that the fortunate cause of it was just the buried treasure of her knowledge.  He had with his own hands dug up this little hoard, brought to light—­that is to within reach of the dim day constituted by their discretions and privacies—­the object of value the hiding-place of which he had, after putting it into the ground himself, so strangely, so long forgotten.  The rare luck of his having again just stumbled on the spot made him indifferent to any other question; he would doubtless have devoted more time to the odd accident of his lapse of memory if he hadn’t been moved to devote so much to the sweetness, the comfort, as he felt, for the future, that this accident itself had helped to keep fresh.  It had never entered into his plan that any one should “know”, and mainly for the reason that it wasn’t in him to tell any one.  That would have been impossible, for nothing but the amusement of a cold world would have waited on it.  Since, however, a mysterious fate had opened his mouth betimes, in spite of him, he would count that a compensation and profit by it to the utmost.  That the right person should know tempered the asperity of his secret more even than his shyness had permitted him to imagine; and May Bartram was clearly right, because—­well, because there she was.  Her knowledge simply settled it; he would have been sure enough by this time had she been wrong.  There was that in his situation, no doubt, that disposed him too much to see her as a mere confidant, taking all her light for him from the fact—­the fact only—­of her interest in his predicament; from her mercy, sympathy, seriousness, her consent not to regard him as the funniest of the funny.  Aware, in fine, that her price for him was just in her giving him this constant sense of his being admirably spared, he was careful to remember that she had also a life of her own, with things that might happen to her, things that in friendship one should likewise take account of.  Something fairly remarkable came to pass with him, for that matter, in this connexion—­something represented by a certain passage of his consciousness, in the suddenest way, from one extreme to the other.