been
magnificently paid, his equivalent office was to take effect--such
items might well fill his consciousness when there was nothing from
outside to interfere. Never was a consciousness more rounded and
fastened down over what filled it; which is precisely what we have
spoken of as, in its degree, the oppression of success, the somewhat
chilled state--tending to the solitary--of supreme recognition. If it
was slightly awful to feel so justified, this was by the loss of the
warmth of the element of mystery. The lucid reigned instead of it, and
it was into the lucid that he sat and stared. He shook himself out of
it a dozen times a day, tried to break by his own act his constant
still communion. It wasn't still communion she had meant to bequeath
him; it was the very different business of that kind of fidelity of
which the other name was careful action.

Nothing, he perfectly knew, was less like careful action than the
immersion he enjoyed at home. The actual grand queerness was that to be
faithful to Kate he had positively to take his eyes, his arms, his lips
straight off her--he had to let her alone. He had to remember it was
time to go to the palace--which in truth was a mercy, since the check
was not less effectual than imperative. What it came to, fortunately,
as yet, was that when he closed the door behind him for an absence he
always shut her in. Shut her out--it came to that rather, when once he
had got a little away; and before he reached the palace, much more
after hearing at his heels the bang of the greater _portone_, he felt
free enough not to know his position as oppressively false. As Kate was
_all_ in his poor rooms, and not a ghost of her left for the grander,
it was only on reflexion that the falseness came out; so long as he
left it to the mercy of beneficent chance it offered him no face and
made of him no claim that he couldn't meet without aggravation of his
inward sense. This aggravation had been his original horror; yet
what--in Milly's presence, each day--was horror doing with him but
virtually letting him off? He shouldn't perhaps get off to the end;
there was time enough still for the possibility of shame to pounce.
Still, however, he did constantly a little more what he liked best, and
that kept him for the time more safe. What he liked best was, in any
case, to know why things were as he felt them; and he knew it pretty
well, in this case, ten days after the retreat of his other friends. He