Way," and to bring news that was singularly relevant. The evening
papers were just out with a telegram on the author of that work,
who, in Rome, had been ill for some days with an attack of malarial
fever. It had at first not been thought grave, but had taken, in
consequence of complications, a turn that might give rise to
anxiety. Anxiety had indeed at the latest hour begun to be felt.

I was struck in the presence of these tidings with the fundamental
detachment that Mrs. Corvick's overt concern quite failed to hide:
it gave me the measure of her consummate independence. That
independence rested on her knowledge, the knowledge which nothing
now could destroy and which nothing could make different. The
figure in the carpet might take on another twist or two, but the
sentence had virtually been written. The writer might go down to
his grave: she was the person in the world to whom--as if she had
been his favoured heir--his continued existence was least of a
need. This reminded me how I had observed at a particular moment--
after Corvick's death--the drop of her desire to see him face to
face. She had got what she wanted without that. I had been sure
that if she hadn't got it she wouldn't have been restrained from
the endeavour to sound him personally by those superior reflexions,
more conceivable on a man's part than on a woman's, which in my
case had served an a deterrent. It wasn't however, I hasten to
add, that my case, in spite of this invidious comparison, wasn't
ambiguous enough. At the thought that Vereker was perhaps at that
moment dying there rolled over me a wave of anguish--a poignant
sense of how inconsistently I still depended on him. A delicacy
that it was my one compensation to suffer to rule me had left the
Alps and the Apennines between us, but the sense of the waning
occasion suggested that I might in my despair at last have gone to