And, for himself; well, if it was tragic to have to die, it was a tragedy one got used to. He might have felt it more if only Kitty hadn't been there to feel it so superabundantly for him. No: he could keep up; he could see to it that the pendulum didn't falter; but he couldn't hide from himself that its swing was growing mechanical.
By the end of the third week the serpent was awake and walking in Paradise. Holland was tired; profoundly tired.
He found his wife's eyes on him one day as they sat with books under the trees on the lawn. He tried to read the books now, though in a casual manner that would offer no offence to Kitty's unoccupied hands and eyes. He wanted very much to read and to forget himself—to forget Kitty—for a little while. It was difficult to do this when such a desultory air must be assumed, when he must be ready to answer anything she said at a moment's notice, and must remember to look up and smile at her or to read some passage aloud to her at every few pages. But he had been trying thus to combine oblivion and alertness when a longer interval than usual of the first held him beguiled, and alertness, when it returned, returned too late. Kitty's eyes made him think of the eyes she had gazed with on the day of revelation in the library. They were candid, they were frightened; the eyes of the real child. Now, as then, they were drinking in some new knowledge; a new fear and an old fear, come close at last, were pressing on her. He felt so tired that he would have liked to look away and to have pretended not to see; but he was not so tired as to be cruel, and he tried to smile at her, as, tilting his hat over his eyes so that they were shadowed, he asked her what she was thinking of.
She rose and came to him, kneeling down beside his chair and putting her hands on his shoulders.
"What is the matter, Kitty?" he asked her, as he had asked on that morning three weeks before.
"Nicholas—Nicholas—are you feeling worse?" she returned.
Holland was surprised and almost relieved. It was no new demand, it was merely a sharper fear. And perhaps she was right, perhaps he was feeling worse and the end was approaching. If so, any languor would be taken as symptomatic of dissolution and not of indifference, and he might relax his hold. Actually a deep wave of satisfaction seemed to go lapping through him.
"I don't feel badly, dear," he said, smoothing back her hair. "You know, I shall suffer hardly any pain; but I do feel very tired."
"In what way tired?" Another alarm was in her voice.
"Bodily fatigue, dear. Of course, one doesn't die without fading."