ents in which she
had received him, the sala corresponding to the sala below and fronting
the great canal with its gothic arches. The casements between the
arches were open, the ledge of the balcony broad, the sweep of the
canal, so overhung, admirable, and the flutter toward them of the loose
white curtain an invitation to she scarce could have said what. But
there was no mystery after a moment; she had never felt so invited to
anything as to make that, and that only, just where she was, her
adventure. It would be--to this it kept coming back--the adventure of
not stirring. "I go about just here."

"Do you mean," Lord Mark presently asked, "that you're really not well?"

They were at the window, pausing, lingering, with the fine old faded
palaces opposite and the slow Adriatic tide beneath; but after a
minute, and before she answered, she had closed her eyes to what she
saw and unresistingly dropped her face into her arms, which rested on
the coping. She had fallen to her knees on the cushion of the
window-place, and she leaned there, in a long silence, with her
forehead down. She knew that her silence was itself too straight an
answer, but it was beyond her now to say that she saw her way. She
would have made the question itself impossible to others--impossible
for example to such a man as Merton Densher; and she could wonder even
on the spot what it was a sign of in her feeling for Lord Mark that
from his lips it almost tempted her to break down. This was doubtless
really because she cared for him so little; to let herself go with him
thus, suffer his touch to make her cup overflow, would be the
relief--since it was actually, for her nerves, a question of
relief--that would cost her least. If he had come to her moreover with
the intention she believed, or even if this intention had but been
determined in him by the spell of their situation, he mustn't be
mistaken about her value--for what value did she now have? It throbbed
within her as she knelt there that she had none at all; though, holding
herself, not yet speaking, she tried, even in the act, to recover what
might be possible of it. With that there came to her a light: wouldn't
her value, for the man who should marry her, be precisely in the ravage
of her disease? _She_ mightn't last, but her money would. For a man in
whom the vision of her money should be intense, in whom it should be
most of the ground for "making up" to her, any prospective failure on
her