hem within and without did so much toward making appreciative
stillness as natural as at the opera, that she could consider she
hadn't made him hang on her lips when at last, instead of saying if she
were well or ill, she repeated: "I go about here. I don't get tired of
it. I never should--it suits me so. I adore the place," she went on,
"and I don't want in the least to give it up."

"Neither should I if I had your luck. Still, with that luck, for one's
_all_--! Should you positively like to live here?"

"I think I should like," said poor Milly after an instant, "to die
here."

Which made him, precisely, laugh. That was what she wanted--when a
person did care: it was the pleasant human way, without depths of
darkness. "Oh it's not good enough for _that!_ That requires picking.
But can't you keep it? It is, you know, the sort of place to see you
in; you carry out the note, fill it, people it, quite by yourself, and
you might do much worse--I mean for your friends--than show yourself
here a while, three or four months, every year. But it's not my notion
for the rest of the time. One has quite other uses for you."

"What sort of a use for me is it," she smilingly enquired, "to kill me?"

"Do you mean we should kill you in England?"

"Well, I've seen you and I'm afraid. You're too much for me--too many.
England bristles with questions. This is more, as you say there, my
form."

"Oho, oho!"--he laughed again as if to humour her. "Can't you then buy
it--for a price? Depend upon it they'll treat for money. That is for
money enough."

"I've exactly," she said, "been wondering if they won't. I think I
shall try. But if I get it I shall cling to it." They were talking
sincerely. "It will be my life--paid for as that. It will become my
great gilded shell; so that those who wish to find me must come and
hunt me up."

"Ah then you _will_ be alive," said Lord Mark.

"Well, not quite extinct perhaps, but shrunken, wasted, wizened;
rattling about here like the dried kernel of a nut."

"Oh," Lord Mark returned, "we, much as you mistrust us, can do better
for you than that."

"In the sense that you'll feel it better for me really to have it over?"

He let her see now that she worried him, and after a look at her, of
some duration, without his glasses--which always altered the expression
of his eyes--he re-settled the nippers on his nose and went back to the
view. But the view, in turn, soon enough released him. "Do you r