tance at that first dinner of Aunt Maud's, that he was adequately
human. That first dinner of Aunt Maud's added itself to the hour at
Matcham, added itself to other things, to consolidate, for her present
benevolence, the ease of their relation, making it suddenly delightful
that he had thus turned up. He exclaimed, as he looked about, on the
charm of the place: "What a temple to taste and an expression of the
pride of life, yet, with all that, what a jolly _home!_"--so that, for
his entertainment, she could offer to walk him about though she
mentioned that she had just been, for her own purposes, in a general
prowl, taking everything in more susceptibly than before. He embraced
her offer without a scruple and seemed to rejoice that he was to find
her susceptible.

IV

She couldn't have said what it was, in the conditions, that renewed the
whole solemnity, but by the end of twenty minutes a kind of wistful
hush had fallen upon them, as before something poignant in which her
visitor also participated. That was nothing verily but the perfection
of the charm--or nothing rather but their excluded disinherited state
in the presence of it. The charm turned on them a face that was cold in
its beauty, that was full of a poetry never to be theirs, that spoke
with an ironic smile of a possible but forbidden life. It all rolled
afresh over Milly: "Oh the impossible romance--!" The romance for her,
yet once more, would be to sit there for ever, through all her time, as
in a fortress; and the idea became an image of never going down, of
remaining aloft in the divine dustless air, where she would hear but
the plash of the water against stone. The great floor on which they
moved was at an altitude, and this prompted the rueful fancy. "Ah not
to go down--never, never to go down!" she strangely sighed to her
friend.

"But why shouldn't you," he asked, "with that tremendous old staircase
in your court? There ought of course always to be people at top and
bottom, in Veronese costumes, to watch you do it."

She shook her head both lightly and mournfully enough at his not
understanding. "Not even for people in Veronese costumes. I mean that
the positive beauty is that one needn't go down. I don't move in fact,"
she added--"now. I've not been out, you know. I stay up. That's how you
happily found me."

Lord Mark wondered--he was, oh yes, adequately human. "You don't go
about?"

She looked over the place, the storey above the apartm