Only I can't
listen or receive or accept--I can't _agree_. I can't make a bargain. I
can't really. You must believe that from me. It's all I've wanted to
say to you, and why should it spoil anything?"

He let her question fall--though clearly, it might have seemed,
because, for reasons or for none, there was so much that _was_ spoiled.
"You want somebody of your own." He came back, whether in good faith or
in bad, to that; and it made her repeat her headshake. He kept it up as
if his faith were of the best. "You want somebody, you want somebody."

She was to wonder afterwards if she hadn't been at this juncture on the
point of saying something emphatic and vulgar--"Well, I don't at all
events want _you!_" What somehow happened, nevertheless, the pity of it
being greater than the irritation--the sadness, to her vivid sense, of
his being so painfully astray, wandering in a desert in which there was
nothing to nourish him--was that his error amounted to positive
wrongdoing. She was moreover so acquainted with quite another sphere of
usefulness for him that her having suffered him to insist almost
convicted her of indelicacy. Why hadn't she stopped him off with her
first impression of his purpose? She could do so now only by the
allusion she had been wishing not to make. "Do you know I don't think
you're doing very right?--and as a thing quite apart, I mean, from my
listening to you. That's not right either--except that I'm _not_
listening. You oughtn't to have come to Venice to see _me_--and in fact
you've not come, and you mustn't behave as if you had. You've much
older friends than I, and ever so much better. Really, if you've come
at all, you can only have come--properly, and if I may say so
honourably--for the best friend, as I believe her to be, that you have
in the world."

When once she had said it he took it, oddly enough, as if he had been
more or less expecting it. Still, he looked at her very hard, and they
had a moment of this during which neither pronounced a name, each
apparently determined that the other should. It was Milly's fine
coercion, in the event, that was the stronger. "Miss Croy?" Lord Mark
asked.

It might have been difficult to make out that she smiled. "Mrs.
Lowder." He did make out something, and then fairly coloured for its
attestation of his comparative simplicity. "I call _her_ on the whole
the best. I can't imagine a man's having a better."

Still with his eyes on her he turned it ove