in the object that she regarded as the most beautiful in the world. He
had taken it from her in the Park that night that she wanted him not to
propose to her to sup; but he had put away the lesson by this time--he
practically proposed supper every time he looked at her. This was what,
for that matter, mainly filled the three days. He came in twice on each
of these, and it was as if he came in to give her a chance to relent.
That was after all, she said to herself in the intervals, the most that
he did. There were ways, she fully recognised, in which he spared her,
and other particular ways as to which she meant that her silence should
be full to him of exquisite pleading. The most particular of all was his
not being outside, at the corner, when she quitted the place for the
night. This he might so easily have been--so easily if he hadn't been so
nice. She continued to recognise in his forbearance the fruit of her
dumb supplication, and the only compensation he found for it was the
harmless freedom of being able to appear to say: "Yes, I'm in town only
for three or four days, but, you know, I _would_ stay on." He struck her
as calling attention each day, each hour, to the rapid ebb of time; he
exaggerated to the point of putting it that there were only two days
more, that there was at last, dreadfully, only one.

There were other things still that he struck her as doing with a special
intention; as to the most marked of which--unless indeed it were the most
obscure--she might well have marvelled that it didn't seem to her more
horrid. It was either the frenzy of her imagination or the disorder of
his baffled passion that gave her once or twice the vision of his putting
down redundant money--sovereigns not concerned with the little payments
he was perpetually making--so that she might give him some sign of
helping him to slip them over to her. What was most extraordinary in
this impression was the amount of excuse that, with some incoherence, she
found for him. He wanted to pay her because there was nothing to pay her