ill me if she _were_ to tell me."

"To tell you?" He was still at a loss.

"How she feels. How she clings. How she doesn't want it."

"How she doesn't want to die? Of course she doesn't want it." He had a
long pause, and they might have been thinking together of what they
could even now do to prevent it. This, however, was not what he brought
out. Milly's "grimness" and the great hushed palace were present to
him; present with the little woman before him as she must have been
waiting there and listening. "Only, what harm have _you_ done her?"

Mrs. Stringham looked about in her darkness. "I don't know. I come and
talk of her here with you."

It made him again hesitate. "Does she utterly hate me?"

"I don't know. How _can_ I? No one ever will."

"She'll never tell?"

"She'll never tell."

Once more he thought. "She must be magnificent."

"She _is_ magnificent."

His friend, after all, helped him, and he turned it, so far as he
could, all over. "Would she see me again?"

It made his companion stare. "Should you like to see her?"

"You mean as you describe her?" He felt her surprise, and it took him
some time. "No."

"Ah then!" Mrs. Stringham sighed.

"But if she could bear it I'd do anything."

She had for the moment her vision of this, but it collapsed. "I don't
see what you can do."

"I don't either. But _she_ might."

Mrs. Stringham continued to think. "It's too late."

"Too late for her to see--?"

"Too late."

The very decision of her despair--it was after all so lucid--kindled in
him a heat. "But the doctor, all the while--?"

"Tacchini? Oh he's kind. He comes. He's proud of having been approved
and coached by a great London man. He hardly in fact goes away; so that
I scarce know what becomes of his other patients. He thinks her, justly
enough, a great personage; he treats her like royalty; he's waiting on
events. But she has barely consented to see him, and, though she has
told him, generously--for she _thinks_ of me, dear creature--that he
may come, that he may stay, for my sake, he spends most of his time
only hovering at her door, prowling through the rooms, trying to
entertain me, in that ghastly saloon, with the gossip of Venice, and
meeting me, in doorways, in the sala, on the staircase, with an
agreeable intolerable smile. We don't," said Susan Shepherd, "talk of
her."

"By her request?"

"Absolutely. I don't do what she doesn't wish. We talk of the price of
provisions."

"