THE WINGS OF THE DOVE
observed, if the term could ever apply to members of a race in whom vacancy was but a nest of darknesses—not a vain surface, but a place of withdrawal in which something obscure, something always ominous, indistinguishably lived. He felt afresh indeed, at this hour, the force of the veto laid, in the house, on any mention, any cognition, of the liabilities of its mistress. Her health, or her illness, was not confessed to there as a reason. Whether it was inwardly known as one was another matter; of which he grew fully aware on carrying his inquiry further. His appeal was to his friend Eugenio, whom he immediately sent for, with whom, for three rich minutes, protected from the weather, he was confronted in the gallery that led from the water-steps to the court, and whom he always called, in meditation, his friend because it was unmistakable that he would have put an end to him if he could. That produced a relation which required a name of its own, an intimacy of consciousness, in truth, for each—an intimacy of eye, of ear, of general sensibility, of everything but tongue. It had been, in other words, for the five weeks, far from occult to our young man that Eugenio took a vulgar view of him, which was at the same time a view he was definitely hindered from preventing. It was all in the air now again; it was as much between them as ever while Eugenio waited on him in the court.
The weather, from early morning, had turned to storm, the first sea-storm of the autumn, and Den-
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