hs too--seen he meant it. She looked again at
Lady Wells, who was nearer, but she quickly came back. "And if I do
understand?"

"I'll do everything."

She found anew a pretext in her approaching friend: he was fairly
playing with her pride. He had never, he then knew, tasted, in all his
relation with her, of anything so sharp--too sharp for mere
sweetness--as the vividness with which he saw himself master in the
conflict. "Well, I understand."

"On your honour?"

"On my honour."

"You'll come?"

"I'll come."

BOOK NINTH

I

It was after they had gone that he truly felt the difference, which was
most to be felt moreover in his faded old rooms. He had recovered from
the first a part of his attachment to this scene of contemplation,
within sight, as it was, of the Rialto bridge, on the hither side of
that arch of associations and the left going up the Canal; he had seen
it in a particular light, to which, more and more, his mind and his
hands adjusted it; but the interest the place now wore for him had
risen at a bound, becoming a force that, on the spot, completely
engaged and absorbed him, and relief from which--if relief was the
name--he could find only by getting away and out of reach. What had
come to pass within his walls lingered there as an obsession
importunate to all his senses; it lived again, as a cluster of pleasant
memories, at every hour and in every object; it made everything but
itself irrelevant and tasteless. It remained, in a word, a conscious
watchful presence, active on its own side, for ever to be reckoned
with, in face of which the effort at detachment was scarcely less
futile than frivolous. Kate had come to him; it was only once--and this
not from any failure of their need, but from such impossibilities, for
bravery alike and for subtlety, as there was at the last no blinking;
yet she had come, that once, to stay, as people called it; and what
survived of her, what reminded and insisted, was something he couldn't
have banished if he had wished. Luckily he didn't wish, even though
there might be for a man almost a shade of the awful in so unqualified
a consequence of his act. It had simply _worked_, his idea, the idea he
had made her accept; and all erect before him, really covering the
ground as far as he could see, was the fact of the gained success that
this represented. It was, otherwise, but the fact of the idea as
directly applied, as converted from a luminous concepti