omparatively sequestered cafe where he had already more
than once found refreshment and comparative repose, together with
solutions that consisted mainly and pleasantly of further indecisions.
It was a literal fact that those awaiting him there to-night, while he
leaned back on his velvet bench with his head against a florid mirror
and his eyes not looking further than the fumes of his tobacco, might
have been regarded by him as a little less limp than usual. This wasn't
because, before getting to his feet again, there was a step he had seen
his way to; it was simply because the acceptance of his position took
sharper effect from his sense of what he had just had to deal with.
When half an hour before, at the palace, he had turned about to Milly
on the question of the impossibility so inwardly felt, turned about on
the spot and under her eyes, he had acted, by the sudden force of his
seeing much further, seeing how little, how not at all, impossibilities
mattered. It wasn't a case for pedantry; when people were at _her_ pass
everything was allowed. And her pass was now, as by the sharp click of
a spring, just completely his own--to the extent, as he felt, of her
deep dependence on him. Anything he should do or shouldn't would have
close reference to her life, which was thus absolutely in his
hands--and ought never to have reference to anything else. It was on
the cards for him that he might kill her--that was the way he read the
cards as he sat in his customary corner. The fear in this thought made
him let everything go, kept him there actually, all motionless, for
three hours on end. He renewed his consumption and smoked more
cigarettes than he had ever done in the time. What had come out for him
had come out, with this first intensity, as a terror; so that action
itself, of any sort, the right as well as the wrong--if the difference
even survived--had heard in it a vivid "Hush!" the injunction to keep
from that moment intensely still. He thought in fact while his vigil
lasted of several different ways for his doing so, and the hour might
have served him as a lesson in going on tiptoe.

What he finally took home, when he ventured to leave the place, was the
perceived truth that he might on any other system go straight to
destruction. Destruction was represented for him by the idea of his
really bringing to a point, on Milly's side, anything whatever. Nothing
so "brought," he easily argued, but _must_ be in one way or an