for her
wish itself, and he would stay in spite of her, stay in spite of odium,
stay in spite perhaps of some final experience that would be, for the
pain of it, all but unbearable. That would be his one way, purified
though he was, to mark his virtue beyond any mistake. It would be
accepting the disagreeable, and the disagreeable would be a proof; a
proof of his not having stayed for the thing--the agreeable, as it
were--that Kate had named. The thing Kate had named was not to have
been the odium of staying in spite of hints. It was part of the odium
as actual too that Kate was, for her comfort, just now well aloof.
These were the first hours since her flight in which his sense of what
she had done for him on the eve of that event was to incur a
qualification. It was strange, it was perhaps base, to be thinking such
things so soon; but one of the intimations of his solitude was that she
had provided for herself. She was out of it all, by her act, as much as
he was in it; and this difference grew, positively, as his own
intensity increased. She had said in their last sharp snatch of
talk--sharp though thickly muffled, and with every word in it final and
deep, unlike even the deepest words they had ever yet spoken: "Letters?
Never--_now_. Think of it. Impossible." So that as he had sufficiently
caught her sense--into which he read, all the same, a strange
inconsequence--they had practically wrapped their understanding in the
breach of their correspondence. He had moreover, on losing her, done
justice to her law of silence; for there was doubtless a finer delicacy
in his not writing to her than in his writing as he must have written
had he spoken of themselves. That would have been a turbid strain, and
her idea had been to be noble; which, in a degree, was a manner. Only
it left her, for the pinch, comparatively at ease. And it left _him_,
in the conditions, peculiarly alone. He was alone, that is, till, on
the afternoon of his third day, in gathering dusk and renewed rain,
with his shabby rooms looking doubtless, in their confirmed dreariness,
for the mere eyes of others, at their worst, the grinning padrona threw
open the door and introduced Mrs. Stringham. That made at a bound a
difference, especially when he saw that his visitor was weighted. It
appeared part of her weight that she was in a wet waterproof, that she
allowed her umbrella to be taken from her by the good woman without
consciousness or care, and that her f