e?"

"'Safe'--?" She had for twenty seconds an exquisite pale glare. Oh but
he didn't need it, by that time, to wince; he had winced for himself as
soon as he had made his mistake. He had done what, so unforgettably,
she had asked him in London not to do; he had touched, all alone with
her here, the supersensitive nerve of which she had warned him. He had
not, since the occasion in London, touched it again till now; but he
saw himself freshly warned that it was able to bear still less. So for
the moment he knew as little what to do as he had ever known it in his
life. He couldn't emphasise that he thought of her as dying, yet he
couldn't pretend he thought of her as indifferent to precautions.
Meanwhile too she had narrowed his choice. "You suppose me so awfully
bad?"

He turned, in his pain, within himself; but by the time the colour had
mounted to the roots of his hair he had found what he wanted. "I'll
believe whatever you tell me."

"Well then, I'm splendid."

"Oh I don't need you to tell me that."

"I mean I'm capable of life."

"I've never doubted it."

"I mean," she went on, "that I want so to live--!"

"Well?" he asked while she paused with the intensity of it.

"Well, that I know I _can_."

"Whatever you do?" He shrank from solemnity about it.

"Whatever I do. If I want to."

"If you want to do it?"

"If I want to live. I _can_," Milly repeated.

He had clumsily brought it on himself, but he hesitated with all the
pity of it. "Ah then that I believe."

"I will, I will," she declared; yet with the weight of it somehow
turned for him to mere light and sound.

He felt himself smiling through a mist. "You simply must!"

It brought her straight again to the fact. "Well then, if you say it,
why mayn't we pay you our visit?"

"Will it help you to live?"

"Every little helps," she laughed; "and it's very little for me, in
general, to stay at home. Only I shan't want to miss it--!"

"Yes?"--she had dropped again.

"Well, on the day you give us a chance."

It was amazing what so brief an exchange had at this point done with
him. His great scruple suddenly broke, giving way to something
inordinately strange, something of a nature to become clear to him only
when he had left her. "You can come," he said, "when you like."

What had taken place for him, however--the drop, almost with violence,
of everything but a sense of her own reality--apparently showed in his
face or his manner, and even so