n common mercy, be warrant enough? She would never,
never leave it--she would engage to that; would ask nothing more than
to sit tight in it and float on and on. The beauty and intensity, the
real momentary relief of this conceit, reached their climax in the
positive purpose to put the question to Eugenio on his return as she
had not yet put it; though the design, it must be added, dropped a
little when, coming back to the great saloon from which she had started
on her pensive progress, she found Lord Mark, of whose arrival in
Venice she had been unaware, and who had now--while a servant was
following her through empty rooms--been asked, in her absence, to wait.
He had waited then, Lord Mark, he was waiting--oh unmistakeably; never
before had he so much struck her as the man to do that on occasion with
patience, to do it indeed almost as with gratitude for the chance,
though at the same time with a sort of notifying firmness. The odd
thing, as she was afterwards to recall, was that her wonder for what
had brought him was not immediate, but had come at the end of five
minutes; and also, quite incoherently, that she felt almost as glad to
see him, and almost as forgiving of his interruption of her solitude,
as if he had already been in her thought or acting at her suggestion.
He was some-how, at the best, the end of a respite; one might like him
very much and yet feel that his presence tempered precious solitude
more than any other known to one: in spite of all of which, as he was
neither dear Susie, nor dear Kate, nor dear Aunt Maud, nor even, for
the least, dear Eugenio in person, the sight of him did no damage to
her sense of the dispersal of her friends. She hadn't been so
thoroughly alone with him since those moments of his showing her the
great portrait at Matcham, the moments that had exactly made the
high-water-mark of her security, the moments during which her tears
themselves, those she had been ashamed of, were the sign of her
consciously rounding her protective promontory, quitting the blue gulf
of comparative ignorance and reaching her view of the troubled sea. His
presence now referred itself to his presence then, reminding her how
kind he had been, altogether, at Matcham, and telling her,
unexpectedly, at a time when she could particularly feel it, that, for
such kindness and for the beauty of what they remembered together, she
hadn't lost him--quite the contrary. To receive him handsomely, to
receive him th