THE WINGS OF THE DOVE
her pass was now, as by the sharp click of a spring, just completely his own—to the extent, as he felt, of her deep dependence on him. Anything he should do, or he shouldn't, would have reference, directly, to her life, which was thus absolutely in his hands—and ought never to have reference to anything else. It was on the cards for him that he might kill her—that was the way he read the cards as he sat in his customary corner. The fear in this thought made him let everything go, kept him there, actually, motionless, for three hours on end. He renewed his consumption and smoked more cigarettes than he had ever done in the time. What had come out for him had come out, with this first intensity, as a terror; so that action itself, of any sort, the right as well as the wrong—if the difference even survived—had heard in it a vivid "Hush!" the injunction, from that moment, to keep intensely still. He thought, in fact, while his vigil lasted, of the different ways of doing so, and the hour might have served him as a lesson in going on tip-toe.
What he finally took home, when he ventured to leave the place, was the perceived truth that he might on any other system go straight to destruction. Destruction was represented for him by the idea of his really bringing to a point, on Milly's side, anything whatever. Nothing so "brought," he easily argued, but must be in one way or another a catastrophe. He was mixed up in her fate, or her fate, if that were better, was mixed up in him, so that a sin-
275
