ea with a kind of terror, but a terror all for others. Lord Mark
winced and flushed--clearly couldn't help it; but he kept his attitude
together and spoke even with unwonted vivacity. "Do you imagine I can
see you suffer and not say a word?"

"You won't see me suffer--don't be afraid. I shan't be a public
nuisance. That's why I should have liked _this:_ it's so beautiful in
itself and yet it's out of the gangway. You won't know anything about
anything," she added; and then as if to make with decision an end: "And
you _don't!_ No, not even you." He faced her through it with the
remains of his expression, and she saw him as clearly--for
_him_--bewildered; which made her wish to be sure not to have been
unkind. She would be kind once for all; that would be the end. "I'm
very badly ill."

"And you don't do anything?"

"I do everything. Everything's _this_," she smiled. "I'm doing it now.
One can't do more than live."

"Ah than live in the right way, no. But is that what you do? Why
haven't you advice?"

He had looked about at the rococo elegance as if there were fifty
things it didn't give her, so that he suggested with urgency the most
absent. But she met his remedy with a smile. "I've the best advice in
the world. I'm acting under it now. I act upon it in receiving you, in
talking with you thus. One can't, as I tell you, do more than live."

"Oh live!" Lord Mark ejaculated.

"Well, it's immense for _me_." She finally spoke as if for amusement;
now that she had uttered her truth, that he had learnt it from herself
as no one had yet done, her emotion had, by the fact, dried up. There
she was; but it was as if she would never speak again. "I shan't," she
added, "have missed everything."

"Why should you have missed _anything?_" She felt, as he sounded this,
to what, within the minute, he had made up his mind. "You're the person
in the world for whom that's least necessary; for whom one would call
it in fact most impossible; for whom 'missing' at all will surely
require an extraordinary amount of misplaced good will. Since you
believe in advice, for God's sake take _mine_. I know what you want."

Oh she knew he would know it. But she had brought it on herself--or
almost. Yet she spoke with kindness. "I think I want not to be too much
worried."

"You want to be adored." It came at last straight. "Nothing would worry
you less. I mean as I shall do it. It _is_ so"--he firmly kept it up.
"You're not loved enough."