on into an
historic truth. He had known it before but as desired and urged, as
convincingly insisted on for the help it would render; so that at
present, _with_ the help rendered, it seemed to acknowledge its office
and to set up, for memory and faith, an insistence of its own. He had
in fine judged his friend's pledge in advance as an inestimable value,
and what he must now know his case for was that of a possession of the
value to the full. Wasn't it perhaps even rather the value that
possessed _him_, kept him thinking of it and waiting on it, turning
round and round it and making sure of it again from this side and that?

It played for him--certainly in this prime afterglow--the part of a
treasure kept at home in safety and sanctity, something he was sure of
finding in its place when, with each return, he worked his heavy old
key in the lock. The door had but to open for him to be with it again
and for it to be all there; so intensely there that, as we say, no
other act was possible to him than the renewed act, almost the
hallucination, of intimacy. Wherever he looked or sat or stood, to
whatever aspect he gave for the instant the advantage, it was in view
as nothing of the moment, nothing begotten of time or of chance could
be, or ever would; it was in view as, when the curtain has risen, the
play on the stage is in view, night after night, for the fiddlers. He
remained thus, in his own theatre, in his single person, perpetual
orchestra to the ordered drama, the confirmed "run"; playing low and
slow, moreover, in the regular way, for the situations of most
importance. No other visitor was to come to him; he met, he bumped
occasionally, in the Piazza or in his walks, against claimants to
acquaintance, remembered or forgotten, at present mostly effusive,
sometimes even inquisitive; but he gave no address and encouraged no
approach; he couldn't for his life, he felt, have opened his door to a
third person. Such a person would have interrupted him, would have
profaned his secret or perhaps have guessed it; would at any rate have
broken the spell of what he conceived himself--in the absence of
anything "to show"--to be inwardly doing. He was giving himself
up--that was quite enough--to the general feeling of his renewed
engagement to fidelity. The force of the engagement, the quantity of
the article to be supplied, the special solidity of the contract, the
way, above all, as a service for which the price named by him had