further said was to stand for the redoubled thrust of flame that would make combustion sure.  “This isn’t sudden to me, and I’ve wondered at moments if you haven’t felt me coming to it.  I’ve been coming ever since we left Fawns—­I really started while we were there.”  He spoke slowly, giving her, as he desired, time to think; all the more that it was making her look at him steadily, and making her also, in a remarkable degree, look “well” while she did so—­a large and, so far, a happy, consequence.  She wasn’t at all events shocked—­which he had glanced at but for a handsome humility—­and he would give her as many minutes as she liked.  “You mustn’t think I’m forgetting that I’m not young.”

“Oh, that isn’t so.  It’s I that am old.  You are young.”  This was what she had at first answered—­and quite in the tone too of having taken her minutes.  It had not been wholly to the point, but it had been kind—­which was what he most wanted.  And she kept, for her next words, to kindness, kept to her clear, lowered voice and unshrinking face.  “To me too it thoroughly seems that these days have been beautiful.  I shouldn’t be grateful to them if I couldn’t more or less have imagined their bringing us to this.”  She affected him somehow as if she had advanced a step to meet him and yet were at the same time standing still.  It only meant, however, doubtless, that she was, gravely and reasonably, thinking—­as he exactly desired to make her.  If she would but think enough she would probably think to suit him.  “It seems to me,” she went on, “that it’s for you to be sure.”

“Ah, but I am sure,” said Adam Verver.  “On matters of importance I never speak when I’m not.  So if you can yourself face such a union you needn’t in the least trouble.”

She had another pause, and she might have been felt as facing it while, through lamplight and dusk, through the breath of the mild, slightly damp southwest, she met his eyes without evasion.  Yet she had at the end of another minute debated only to the extent of saying:  “I won’t pretend I don’t think it would be good for me to marry.  Good for me, I mean,” she pursued, “because I’m so awfully unattached.  I should like to be a little less adrift.  I should like to have a home.  I should like to have an existence.  I should like to have a motive for one thing more than another—­a motive outside of myself.  In fact,” she said, so sincerely that it almost showed pain, yet so lucidly that it almost showed humour, “in fact, you know, I want to be married.  It’s—­well, it’s the condition.”

“The condition—?” He was just vague.

“It’s the state, I mean.  I don’t like my own.  ‘Miss,’ among us all, is too dreadful—­except for a shopgirl.  I don’t want to be a horrible English old-maid.”

“Oh, you want to be taken care of.  Very well then, I’ll do it.”

“I dare say it’s very much that.  Only I don’t see why, for what I speak of,” she smiled—­“for a mere escape from my state—­I need do quite so much.”