with which, each time, she bade him good-bye. The look was her repeated
prohibition: "It's what I _have_ to see and to know--so don't touch it.
That but wakes up the old evil, which I keep still, in my way, by
sitting by it. I go now--leave me alone!--to sit by it again. The way
to pity me--if that's what you want--is to believe in me. If we could
really _do_ anything it would be another matter."

He watched her, when she went her way, with the vision of what she thus
a little stiffly carried. It was confused and obscure, but how, with
her head high, it made her hold herself! He really in his own person
might at these moments have been swaying a little aloft as one of the
objects in her poised basket. It was doubtless thanks to some such
consciousness as this that he felt the lapse of the weeks, before the
day of Kate's mounting of his stair, almost swingingly rapid. They
contained for him the contradiction that, whereas periods of waiting
are supposed in general to keep the time slow, it was the wait,
actually, that made the pace trouble him. The secret of that anomaly,
to be plain, was that he was aware of how, while the days melted,
something rare went with them. This something was only a thought, but a
thought precisely of such freshness and such delicacy as made the
precious, of whatever sort, most subject to the hunger of time. The
thought was all his own, and his intimate companion was the last person
he might have shared it with. He kept it back like a favourite pang;
left it behind him, so to say, when he went out, but came home again
the sooner for the certainty of finding it there. Then he took it out
of its sacred corner and its soft wrappings; he undid them one by one,
handling them, handling _it_, as a father, baffled and tender, might
handle a maimed child. But so it was before him--in his dread of who
else might see it. Then he took to himself at such hours, in other
words, that he should never, never know what had been in Milly's
letter. The intention announced in it he should but too probably know;
only that would have been, but for the depths of his spirit, the least
part of it. The part of it missed for ever was the turn she would have
given her act. This turn had possibilities that, somehow, by wondering
about them, his imagination had extraordinarily filled out and refined.
It had made of them a revelation the loss of which was like the sight
of a priceless pearl cast before his eyes--his pledge g