The Wings of the Dove, Volume II

  I

  It was after they had gone that he truly felt the difference, which wasmost to be felt moreover in his faded old rooms. He had recovered fromthe first a part of his attachment to this scene of contemplation,within sight, as it was, of the Rialto bridge, on the hither side ofthat arch of associations and the left going up the Canal; he had seenit in a particular light, to which, more and more, his mind and hishands adjusted it; but the interest the place now wore for him hadrisen at a bound, becoming a force that, on the spot, completelyengaged and absorbed him, and relief from which--if relief was thename--he could find only by getting away and out of reach. What hadcome to pass within his walls lingered there as an obsessionimportunate to all his senses; it lived again, as a cluster of pleasantmemories, at every hour and in every object; it made everything butitself irrelevant and tasteless. It remained, in a word, a consciouswatchful presence, active on its own side, for ever to be reckonedwith, in face of which the effort at detachment was scarcely lessfutile than frivolous. Kate had come to him; it was only once--and thisnot from any failure of their need, but from such impossibilities, forbravery alike and for subtlety, as there was at the last no blinking;yet she had come, that once, to stay, as people called it; and whatsurvived of her, what reminded and insisted, was something he couldn'thave banished if he had wished. Luckily he didn't wish, even thoughthere might be for a man almost a shade of the awful in so unqualifieda consequence of his act. It had simply _worked_, his idea, the idea hehad made her accept; and all erect before him, really covering theground as far as he could see, was the fact of the gained success thatthis represented. It was, otherwise, but the fact of the idea asdirectly applied, as converted from a luminous conception into anhistoric truth. He had known it before but as desired and urged, asconvincingly insisted on for the help it would render; so that atpresent, _with_ the help rendered, it seemed to acknowledge its officeand to set up, for memory and faith, an insistence of its own. He hadin fine judged his friend's pledge in advance as an inestimable value,and what he must now know his case for was that of a possession of thevalue to the full. Wasn't it perhaps even rather the value thatpossessed _him_, kept him thinking of it and waiting on it, turninground and round it and making sure of it again from this side and that?

  It played for him--certainly in this prime afterglow--the part of atreasure kept at home in safety and sanctity, something he was sure offinding in its place when, with each return, he worked his heavy oldkey in the lock. The door had but to open for him to be with it againand for it to be all there; so intensely there that, as we say, noother act was possible to him than the renewed act, almost thehallucination, of intimacy. Wherever he looked or sat or stood, towhatever aspect he gave for the instant the advantage, it was in viewas nothing of the moment, nothing begotten of time or of chance couldbe, or ever would; it was in view as, when the curtain has risen, theplay on the stage is in view, night after night, for the fiddlers. Heremained thus, in his own theatre, in his single person, perpetualorchestra to the ordered drama, the confirmed "run"; playing low andslow, moreover, in the regular way, for the situations of mostimportance. No other visitor was to come to him; he met, he bumpedoccasionally, in the Piazza or in his walks, against claimants toacquaintance, remembered or forgotten, at present mostly effusive,sometimes even inquisitive; but he gave no address and encouraged noapproach; he couldn't for his life, he felt, have opened his door to athird person. Such a person would have interrupted him, would haveprofaned his secret or perhaps have guessed it; would at any rate havebroken the spell of what he conceived himself--in the absence ofanything "to show"--to be inwardly doing. He was giving himselfup--that was quite enough--to the general feeling of his renewedengagement to fidelity. The force of the engagement, the quantity ofthe article to be supplied, the special solidity of the contract, theway, above all, as a service for which the price named by him had beenmagnificently paid, his equivalent office was to take effect--suchitems might well fill his consciousness when there was nothing fromoutside to interfere. Never was a consciousness more rounded andfastened down over what filled it; which is precisely what we havespoken of as, in its degree, the oppression of success, the somewhatchilled state--tending to the solitary--of supreme recognition. If itwas slightly awful to feel so justified, this was by the loss of thewarmth of the element of mystery. The lucid reigned instead of it, andit was into the lucid that he sat and stared. He shook himself out ofit a dozen times a day, tried to break by his own act his constantstill communion. It wasn't still communion she had meant to bequeathhim; it was the very different business of that kind of fidelity ofwhich the other name was careful action.

  Nothing, he perfectly knew, was less like careful action than theimmersion he enjoyed at home. The actual grand queerness was that to befaithful to Kate he had positively to take his eyes, his arms, his lipsstraight off her--he had to let her alone. He had to remember it wastime to go to the palace--which in truth was a mercy, since the checkwas not less effectual than imperative. What it came to, fortunately,as yet, was that when he closed the door behind him for an absence healways shut her in. Shut her out--it came to that rather, when once hehad got a little away; and before he reached the palace, much moreafter hearing at his heels the bang of the greater _portone_, he feltfree enough not to know his position as oppressively false. As Kate was_all_ in his poor rooms, and not a ghost of her left for the grander,it was only on reflexion that the falseness came out; so long as heleft it to the mercy of beneficent chance it offered him no face andmade of him no claim that he couldn't meet without aggravation of hisinward sense. This aggravation had been his original horror; yetwhat--in Milly's presence, each day--was horror doing with him butvirtually letting him off? He shouldn't perhaps get off to the end;there was time enough still for the possibility of shame to pounce.Still, however, he did constantly a little more what he liked best, andthat kept him for the time more safe. What he liked best was, in anycase, to know why things were as he felt them; and he knew it prettywell, in this case, ten days after the retreat of his other friends. Hethen fairly perceived that--even putting their purity of motive at itshighest--it was neither Kate nor he who made his strange relation toMilly, who made her own, so far as it might be, innocent; it wasneither of them who practically purged it--if practically purged itwas. Milly herself did everything--so far at least as he wasconcerned--Milly herself, and Milly's house, and Milly's hospitality,and Milly's manner, and Milly's character, and, perhaps still more thananything else, Milly's imagination, Mrs. Stringham and Sir Luke indeeda little aiding: whereby he knew the blessing of a fair pretext to askhimself what more he had to do. Something incalculable wrought forthem--for him and Kate; something outside, beyond, above themselves,and doubtless ever so much better than they: which wasn't a reason,however--its being so much better--for them not to profit by it. Not toprofit by it, so far as profit could be reckoned, would have been to godirectly against it; and the spirit of generosity at present engenderedin Densher could have felt no greater pang than by his having to godirectly against Milly.

  To go _with_ her was the thing, so far as she could herself go; which,from the moment her tenure of her loved palace stretched on, waspossible but by his remaining near her. This remaining was of course onthe face of it the most "marked" of demonstrations--which was exactlywhy Kate had required it; it was so marked that on the very evening ofthe day it had taken effect Milly herself hadn't been able not to reachout to him, with an exquisite awkwardness, for some account of it. Itwas as if she had wanted from him some name that, now they were to bealmost alone together, they could, for their further ease, know it andcall it by--it being, after all, almost rudimentary that his presence,of which the absence of the others made quite a different thing,couldn't but have for himself some definite basis. She only wonderedabout the basis it would have for himself, and how he would describeit; that would quite do for her--it even would have done for her, hecould see, had he produced some reason merely trivial, had he said hewas waiting for money
or clothes, for letters or for orders from FleetStreet, without which, as she might have heard, newspaper men nevertook a step. He hadn't in the event quite sunk to that; but he had nonethe less had there with her, that night, on Mrs. Stringham's leavingthem alone--Mrs. Stringham proved really prodigious--his acquaintancewith a shade of awkwardness darker than any Milly could know. He hadsupposed himself beforehand, on the question of what he was doing orpretending, in possession of some tone that would serve; but there werethree minutes of his feeling incapable of promptness quite in the samedegree in which a gentleman whose pocket has been picked feelsincapable of purchase. It even didn't help him, oddly, that he was sureKate would in some way have spoken for him--or rather not so much insome way as in one very particular way. He hadn't asked her, at thelast, what she might, in the connexion, have said; nothing would haveinduced him to put such a question after she had been to see him: hislips were so sealed by that passage, his spirit in fact so hushed, inrespect to any charge upon her freedom. There was something he couldonly therefore read back into the probabilities, and when he left thepalace an hour afterwards it was with a sense of having breathed there,in the very air, the truth he had been guessing.

  Just this perception it was, however, that had made him for the timeugly to himself in his awkwardness. It was horrible, with thiscreature, to _be_ awkward; it was odious to be seeking excuses for therelation that involved it. Any relation that involved it was by thevery fact as much discredited as a dish would be at dinner if one hadto take medicine as a sauce. What Kate would have said in one of theyoung women's last talks was that--if Milly absolutely must have thetruth about it--Mr. Densher was staying because she had really seen noway but to require it of him. If he stayed he didn't follow her--ordidn't appear to her aunt to be doing so; and when she kept him fromfollowing her Mrs. Lowder couldn't pretend, in scenes, the renewal ofwhich at this time of day was painful, that she after all didn't snubhim as she might. She did nothing in fact _but_ snub him--wouldn't thathave been part of the story?--only Aunt Maud's suspicions were of thesort that had repeatedly to be dealt with. He had been, by the sametoken, reasonable enough--as he now, for that matter, well might; hehad consented to oblige them, aunt and niece, by giving the plainestsign possible that he could exist away from London. To exist away fromLondon was to exist away from Kate Croy--which was a gain, muchappreciated, to the latter's comfort. There was a minute, at this hour,out of Densher's three, during which he knew the terror of Milly'suttering some such allusion to their friend's explanation as he mustmeet with words that wouldn't destroy it. To destroy it was to destroyeverything, to destroy probably Kate herself, to destroy in particularby a breach of faith still uglier than anything else the beauty oftheir own last passage. He had given her his word of honour that if shewould come to him he would act absolutely in her sense, and he had doneso with a full enough vision of what her sense implied. What it impliedfor one thing was that to-night in the great saloon, noble in itshalf-lighted beauty, and straight in the white face of his younghostess, divine in her trust, or at any rate inscrutable in hermercy--what it implied was that he should lie with his lips. The singlething, of all things, that could save him from it would be Milly'sletting him off after having thus scared him. What made her mercyinscrutable was that if she had already more than once saved him it wasyet apparently without knowing how nearly he was lost.

  These were transcendent motions, not the less blest for being obscure;whereby yet once more he was to feel the pressure lighten. He was kepton his feet in short by the felicity of her not presenting him withKate's version as aversion to adopt. He couldn't stand up to lie--hefelt as if he should have to go down on his knees. As it was he justsat there shaking a little for nervousness the leg he had crossed overthe other. She was sorry for his suffered snub, but he had nothing moreto subscribe to, to perjure himself about, than the three or fourinanities he had, on his own side, feebly prepared for the crisis. Hescrambled a little higher than the reference to money and clothes,letters and directions from his manager; but he brought out the beautyof the chance for him--there before him like a temptress painted byTitian--to do a little quiet writing. He was vivid for a moment on thedifficulty of writing quietly in London; and he was precipitate, almostexplosive, on his idea, long cherished, of a book.

  The explosion lighted her face. "You'll do your book here?"

  "I hope to begin it."

  "It's something you haven't begun?"

  "Well, only just."

  "And since you came?"

  She was so full of interest that he shouldn't perhaps after all be tooeasily let off. "I tried to think a few days ago that I had brokenground."

  Scarcely anything, it was indeed clear, could have let him in deeper."I'm afraid we've made an awful mess of your time."

  "Of course you have. But what I'm hanging on for now is precisely torepair that ravage."

  "Then you mustn't mind me, you know."

  "You'll see," he tried to say with ease, "how little I shall mindanything."

  "You'll want"--Milly had thrown herself into it--"the best part of yourdays."

  He thought a moment: he did what he could to wreathe it in smiles. "OhI shall make shift with the worst part. The best will be for _you_."And he wished Kate could hear him. It didn't help him moreover that hevisibly, even pathetically, imaged to her by such touches his quest forcomfort against discipline. He was to bury Kate's so signal snub, andalso the hard law she had now laid on him, under a high intellectualeffort. This at least was his crucifixion--that Milly was sointerested. She was so interested that she presently asked him if hefound his rooms propitious, while he felt that in just decentlyanswering her he put on a brazen mask. He should need it quiteparticularly were she to express again her imagination of coming to teawith him--an extremity that he saw he was not to be spared. "We dependon you, Susie and I, you know, not to forget we're coming"--theextremity was but to face that remainder, yet it demanded all his tact.Facing their visit itself--to that, no matter what he might have to do,he would never consent, as we know, to be pushed; and this even thoughit might be exactly such a demonstration as would figure for him at thetop of Kate's list of his proprieties. He could wonder freely enough,deep within, if Kate's view of that especial propriety had not beenmodified by a subsequent occurrence; but his deciding that it was quitelikely not to have been had no effect on his own preference for tact.It pleased him to think of "tact" as his present prop in doubt; thatglossed his predicament over, for it was of application among thesensitive and the kind. He wasn't inhuman, in fine, so long as it wouldserve. It had to serve now, accordingly, to help him not to sweetenMilly's hopes. He didn't want to be rude to them, but he still lesswanted them to flower again in the particular connexion; so that,casting about him in his anxiety for a middle way to meet her, he puthis foot, with unhappy effect, just in the wrong place. "Will it besafe for you to break into your custom of not leaving the house?"

  "'Safe'--?" She had for twenty seconds an exquisite pale glare. Oh buthe didn't need it, by that time, to wince; he had winced for himself assoon as he had made his mistake. He had done what, so unforgettably,she had asked him in London not to do; he had touched, all alone withher here, the supersensitive nerve of which she had warned him. He hadnot, since the occasion in London, touched it again till now; but hesaw himself freshly warned that it was able to bear still less. So forthe moment he knew as little what to do as he had ever known it in hislife. He couldn't emphasise that he thought of her as dying, yet hecouldn't pretend he thought of her as indifferent to precautions.Meanwhile too she had narrowed his choice. "You suppose me so awfullybad?"

  He turned, in his pain, within himself; but by the time the colour hadmounted to the roots of his hair he had found what he wanted. "I'llbelieve whatever you tell me."

  "Well then, I'm splendid."

  "Oh I don't need you to tell me that."

  "I mean I'm capable of life."

  "I've never doubted it."

  "I mean," she went on, "th
at I want so to live--!"

  "Well?" he asked while she paused with the intensity of it.

  "Well, that I know I _can_."

  "Whatever you do?" He shrank from solemnity about it.

  "Whatever I do. If I want to."

  "If you want to do it?"

  "If I want to live. I _can_," Milly repeated.

  He had clumsily brought it on himself, but he hesitated with all thepity of it. "Ah then that I believe."

  "I will, I will," she declared; yet with the weight of it somehowturned for him to mere light and sound.

  He felt himself smiling through a mist. "You simply must!"

  It brought her straight again to the fact. "Well then, if you say it,why mayn't we pay you our visit?"

  "Will it help you to live?"

  "Every little helps," she laughed; "and it's very little for me, ingeneral, to stay at home. Only I shan't want to miss it--!"

  "Yes?"--she had dropped again.

  "Well, on the day you give us a chance."

  It was amazing what so brief an exchange had at this point done withhim. His great scruple suddenly broke, giving way to somethinginordinately strange, something of a nature to become clear to him onlywhen he had left her. "You can come," he said, "when you like."

  What had taken place for him, however--the drop, almost with violence,of everything but a sense of her own reality--apparently showed in hisface or his manner, and even so vividly that she could take it forsomething else. "I see how you feel--that I'm an awful bore about itand that, sooner than have any such upset, you'll go. So it's nomatter."

  "No matter? Oh!"--he quite protested now.

  "If it drives you away to escape us. We want you not to go."

  It was beautiful how she spoke for Mrs. Stringham. Whatever it was, atany rate, he shook his head. "I won't go."

  "Then I won't go!" she brightly declared.

  "You mean you won't come to me?"

  "No--never now. It's over. But it's all right. I mean, apart fromthat," she went on, "that I won't do anything I oughtn't or that I'mnot forced to."

  "Oh who can ever force you?" he asked with his hand-to-mouth way, atall times, of speaking for her encouragement. "You're the leastcoercible of creatures."

  "Because, you think, I'm so free?"

  "The freest person probably now in the world. You've got everything."

  "Well," she smiled, "call it so. I don't complain."

  On which again, in spite of himself, it let him in. "No I know youdon't complain."

  As soon as he had said it he had himself heard the pity in it. Histelling her she had "everything" was extravagant kind humour, whereashis knowing so tenderly that she didn't complain was terrible kindgravity. Milly felt, he could see, the difference; he might as wellhave praised her outright for looking death in the face. This was theway she just looked _him_ again, and it was of no attenuation that shetook him up more gently than ever. "It isn't a merit--when one seesone's way."

  "To peace and plenty? Well, I dare say not."

  "I mean to keeping what one has."

  "Oh that's success. If what one has is good," Densher said at random,"it's enough to try for."

  "Well, it's my limit. I'm not trying for more." To which then she addedwith a change: "And now about your book."

  "My book--?" He had got in a moment so far from it.

  "The one you're now to understand that nothing will induce either Susieor me to run the risk of spoiling."

  He cast about, but he made up his mind. "I'm not doing a book."

  "Not what you said?" she asked in a wonder. "You're not writing?"

  He already felt relieved. "I don't know, upon my honour, what I'mdoing."

  It made her visibly grave; so that, disconcerted in another way, he wasafraid of what she would see in it. She saw in fact exactly what hefeared, but again his honour, as he called it, was saved even while shedidn't know she had threatened it. Taking his words for a betrayal ofthe sense that he, on his side, _might_ complain, what she clearlywanted was to urge on him some such patience as he should be perhapsable to arrive at with her indirect help. Still more clearly, however,she wanted to be sure of how far she might venture; and he could seeher make out in a moment that she had a sort of test.

  "Then if it's not for your book--?"

  "What _am_ I staying for?"

  "I mean with your London work--with all you have to do. Isn't it ratherempty for you?"

  "Empty for me?" He remembered how Kate had held that she might proposemarriage, and he wondered if this were the way she would naturallybegin it. It would leave him, such an incident, he already felt, at aloss, and the note of his finest anxiety might have been in thevagueness of his reply. "Oh well--!"

  "I ask too many questions?" She settled it for herself before he couldprotest. "You stay because you've got to."

  He grasped at it. "I stay because I've got to." And he couldn't havesaid when he had uttered it if it were loyal to Kate or disloyal. Itgave her, in a manner, away; it showed the tip of the ear of her plan.Yet Milly took it, he perceived, but as a plain statement of his truth.He was waiting for what Kate would have told her of--the permissionfrom Lancaster Gate to come any nearer. To remain friends with eitherniece or aunt he mustn't stir without it. All this Densher read in thegirl's sense of the spirit of his reply; so that it made him feel hewas lying, and he had to think of something to correct that. What hethought of was, in an instant, "Isn't it enough, whatever may be one'sother complications, to stay after all for _you?_"

  "Oh you must judge."

  He was by this time on his feet to take leave, and was also at last toorestless. The speech in question at least wasn't disloyal to Kate; thatwas the very tone of their bargain. So was it, by being loyal, anotherkind of lie, the lie of the uncandid profession of a motive. He wasstaying so little "for" Milly that he was staying positively againsther. He didn't, none the less, know, and at last, thank goodness,didn't care. The only thing he could say might make it either better orworse. "Well then, so long as I don't go, you must think of me all _as_judging!"

  II

  He didn't go home, on leaving her--he didn't want to; he walkedinstead, through his narrow ways and his _campi_ with gothic arches, toa small and comparatively sequestered cafe where he had already morethan once found refreshment and comparative repose, together withsolutions that consisted mainly and pleasantly of further indecisions.It was a literal fact that those awaiting him there to-night, while heleaned back on his velvet bench with his head against a florid mirrorand his eyes not looking further than the fumes of his tobacco, mighthave been regarded by him as a little less limp than usual. This wasn'tbecause, before getting to his feet again, there was a step he had seenhis way to; it was simply because the acceptance of his position tooksharper effect from his sense of what he had just had to deal with.When half an hour before, at the palace, he had turned about to Millyon the question of the impossibility so inwardly felt, turned about onthe spot and under her eyes, he had acted, by the sudden force of hisseeing much further, seeing how little, how not at all, impossibilitiesmattered. It wasn't a case for pedantry; when people were at _her_ passeverything was allowed. And her pass was now, as by the sharp click ofa spring, just completely his own--to the extent, as he felt, of herdeep dependence on him. Anything he should do or shouldn't would haveclose reference to her life, which was thus absolutely in hishands--and ought never to have reference to anything else. It was onthe cards for him that he might kill her--that was the way he read thecards as he sat in his customary corner. The fear in this thought madehim let everything go, kept him there actually, all motionless, forthree hours on end. He renewed his consumption and smoked morecigarettes than he had ever done in the time. What had come out for himhad come out, with this first intensity, as a terror; so that actionitself, of any sort, the right as well as the wrong--if the differenceeven survived--had heard in it a vivid "Hush!" the injunction to keepfrom that moment intensely still. He thought in fact while his vigillasted of se
veral different ways for his doing so, and the hour mighthave served him as a lesson in going on tiptoe.

  What he finally took home, when he ventured to leave the place, was theperceived truth that he might on any other system go straight todestruction. Destruction was represented for him by the idea of hisreally bringing to a point, on Milly's side, anything whatever. Nothingso "brought," he easily argued, but _must_ be in one way or another acatastrophe. He was mixed up in her fate, or her fate, if that shouldbe better, was mixed up in _him_, so that a single false motion mighteither way snap the coil. They helped him, it was true, theseconsiderations, to a degree of eventual peace, for what they luminouslyamounted to was that he was to do nothing, and that fell in after allwith the burden laid on him by Kate. He was only not to budge withoutthe girl's leave--not, oddly enough at the last, to move without it,whether further or nearer, any more than without Kate's. It was to thishis wisdom reduced itself--to the need again simply to be kind. Thatwas the same as being still--as studying to create the minimum ofvibration. He felt himself as he smoked shut up to a room on the wallof which something precious was too precariously hung. A false stepwould bring it down, and it must hang as long as possible. He was awarewhen he walked away again that even Fleet Street wouldn't at thisjuncture successfully touch him. His manager might wire that he waswanted, but he could easily be deaf to his manager. His money for theidle life might be none too much; happily, however, Venice was cheap,and it was moreover the queer fact that Milly in a manner supportedhim. The greatest of his expenses really was to walk to the palace todinner. He didn't want, in short, to give that up, and he shouldprobably be able, he felt, to stay his breath and his hand. He shouldbe able to be still enough through everything.

  He tried that for three weeks, with the sense after a little of nothaving failed. There had to be a delicate art in it, for he wasn'ttrying--quite the contrary--to be either distant or dull. That wouldnot have been being "nice," which in its own form was the real law.That too might just have produced the vibration he desired to avert; sothat he best kept everything in place by not hesitating or fearing, asit were, to let himself go--go in the direction, that is to say, ofstaying. It depended on where he went; which was what he meant bytaking care. When one went on tiptoe one could turn off for retreatwithout betraying the manoeuvre. Perfect tact--the necessity for whichhe had from the first, as we know, happily recognised--was to keep allintercourse in the key of the absolutely settled. It was settled thusfor instance that they were indissoluble good friends, and settled aswell that her being the American girl was, just in time and for therelation they found themselves concerned in, a boon inappreciable. If,at least, as the days went on, she was to fall short of her prerogativeof the great national, the great maidenly ease, if she didn'tdiviningly and responsively desire and labour to record herself aspossessed of it, this wouldn't have been for want of Densher's keepingher, with his idea, well up to it--wouldn't have been in fine for wantof his encouragement and reminder. He didn't perhaps in so many wordsspeak to her of the quantity itself as of the thing she was least tointermit; but he talked of it, freely, in what he flattered himself wasan impersonal way, and this held it there before her--since he wascareful also to talk pleasantly. It was at once their idea, when allwas said, and the most marked of their conveniences. The type was soelastic that it could be stretched to almost anything; and yet, notstretched, it kept down, remained normal, remained properly withinbounds. And he _had_ meanwhile, thank goodness, without being too muchdisconcerted, the sense, for the girl's part of the business, of thequeerest conscious compliance, of her doing very much what he wanted,even though without her quite seeing why. She fairly touched this oncein saying: "Oh yes, you like us to be as we are because it's a kind offacilitation to you that we don't quite measure: I think one would haveto be English to measure it!"--and that too, strangely enough, withoutprejudice to her good nature. She might have been conceived asdoing--that is of being--what he liked in order perhaps only to judgewhere it would take them. They really as it went on _saw_ each other atthe game; she knowing he tried to keep her in tune with his conception,and he knowing she thus knew it. Add that he again knew she knew, andyet that nothing was spoiled by it, and we get a fair impression of theline they found most completely workable. The strangest fact of all forus must be that the success he himself thus promoted was precisely whatfigured to his gratitude as the something above and beyond him, aboveand beyond Kate, that made for daily decency. There would scarce havebeen felicity--certainly too little of the right lubricant--had not thenational character so invoked been, not less inscrutably than entirely,in Milly's chords. It made up her unity and was the one thing he couldunlimitedly take for granted.

  He did so then, daily, for twenty days, without deepened fear of theundue vibration that was keeping him watchful. He knew in hisnervousness that he was living at best from day to day and from hand tomouth; yet he had succeeded, he believed, in avoiding a mistake. Allwomen had alternatives, and Milly's would doubtless be shaky too; butthe national character was firm in her, whether as all of her,practically, by this time, or but as a part; the national characterthat, in a woman still so young, made of the air breathed a virtualnon-conductor. It wasn't till a certain occasion when the twenty dayshad passed that, going to the palace at tea-time, he was met by theinformation that the signorina padrona was not "receiving." Theannouncement met him, in the court, on the lips of one of thegondoliers, met him, he thought, with such a conscious eye as theknowledge of his freedoms of access, hitherto conspicuously shown,could scarce fail to beget. Densher had not been at Palazzo Leporelliamong the mere receivable, but had taken his place once for all amongthe involved and included, so that on being so flagrantly braved herecognised after a moment the propriety of a further appeal. Neither ofthe two ladies, it appeared, received, and yet Pasquale was notprepared to say that either was _poco bene_. He was yet not prepared tosay that either was anything, and he would have been blank, Denshermentally noted, if the term could ever apply to members of a race inwhom vacancy was but a nest of darknesses--not a vain surface, but aplace of withdrawal in which something obscure, something alwaysominous, indistinguishably lived. He felt afresh indeed at this hourthe force of the veto laid within the palace on any mention, anycognition, of the liabilities of its mistress. The state of her healthwas never confessed to there as a reason. How much it might deeply betaken for one was another matter; of which he grew fully aware oncarrying his question further. This 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 ledfrom the water-steps to the court, and whom he always called, inmeditation, his friend; seeing it was so elegantly presumable he wouldhave put an end to him if he could. That produced a relation whichrequired a name of its own, an intimacy of consciousness in truth foreach--an intimacy of eye, of ear, of general sensibility, of everythingbut tongue. It had been, in other words, for the five weeks, far fromoccult to our young man that Eugenio took a view of him not less finelyformal than essentially vulgar, but which at the same time he couldn'thimself raise an eyebrow to prevent. It was all in the air now again;it was as much between them as ever while Eugenio waited on him in thecourt.

  The weather, from early morning, had turned to storm, the firstsea-storm of the autumn, and Densher had almost invidiously brought himdown the outer staircase--the massive ascent, the great feature of thecourt, to Milly's _piano nobile_. This was to pay him--it was the onechance--for all imputations; the imputation in particular that, clever,_tanto bello_ and not rich, the young man from London was--by theobvious way--pressing Miss Theale's fortune hard. It was to pay him forthe further ineffable intimation that a gentleman must take the younglady's most devoted servant (interested scarcely less in the highattraction) for a strangely casual appendage if he counted in such aconnexion on impunity and prosperity. These interpretations were odiousto Densher for the simple reason that they might have been so true ofthe attitude of an i
nferior man, and three things alone, accordingly,had kept him from righting himself. One of these was that his criticsought expression only in an impersonality, a positive inhumanity, ofpoliteness; the second was that refinements of expression in a friend'sservant were not a thing a visitor could take action on; and the thirdwas the fact that the particular attribution of motive did him afterall no wrong. It was his own fault if the vulgar view, the view thatmight have been taken of an inferior man, happened so incorrigibly tofit him. He apparently wasn't so different from inferior men as thatcame to. If therefore, in fine, Eugenio figured to him as "my friend"because he was conscious of his seeing so much of him, what he made himsee on the same lines in the course of their present interview was everso much more. Densher felt that he marked himself, no doubt, asinsisting, by dissatisfaction with the gondolier's answer, on thepursuit taken for granted in him; and yet felt it only in theaugmented, the exalted distance that was by this time establishedbetween them. Eugenio had of course reflected that a word to MissTheale from such a pair of lips would cost him his place; but he couldalso bethink himself that, so long as the word never came--and it was,on the basis he had arranged, impossible--he enjoyed the imagination ofmounting guard. He had never so mounted guard, Densher could see, asduring these minutes in the damp _loggia_ where the storm-gusts werestrong; and there came in fact for our young man, as a result of hispresence, a sudden sharp sense that everything had turned to thedismal. Something had happened--he didn't know what; and it wasn'tEugenio who would tell him. What Eugenio told him was that he thoughtthe ladies--as if their liability had been equal--were a "leetle"fatigued, just a "leetle leetle," and without any cause named for it.It was one of the signs of what Densher felt in him that, by aprofundity, a true deviltry of resource, he always met the latter'sItalian with English and his English with Italian. He now, as usual,slightly smiled at him in the process--but ever so slightly this time,his manner also being attuned, our young man made out, to the thing,whatever it was, that constituted the rupture of peace.

  This manner, while they stood a long minute facing each other over allthey didn't say, played a part as well in the sudden jar to Densher'sprotected state. It was a Venice all of evil that had broken out forthem alike, so that they were together in their anxiety, if they reallycould have met on it; a Venice of cold lashing rain from a low blacksky, of wicked wind raging through narrow passes, of general arrest andinterruption, with the people engaged in all the water-life huddled,stranded and wageless, bored and cynical, under archways and bridges.Our young man's mute exchange with his friend contained meanwhile sucha depth of reference that, had the pressure been but slightlyprolonged, they might have reached a point at which they were equallyweak. Each had verily something in mind that would have made a hash ofmutual suspicion and in presence of which, as a possibility, they weremore united than disjoined. But it was to have been a moment forDensher that nothing could ease off--not even the formal propriety withwhich his interlocutor finally attended him to the _portone_ and bowedupon his retreat. Nothing had passed about his coming back, and the airhad made itself felt as a non-conductor of messages. Densher knew ofcourse, as he took his way again, that Eugenio's invitation to returnwas not what he missed; yet he knew at the same time that what hadhappened to him was part of his punishment. Out in the square beyondthe _fondamenta_ that gave access to the land-gate of the palace, outwhere the wind was higher, he fairly, with the thought of it, pulledhis umbrella closer down. It couldn't be, his consciousness, unseenenough by others--the base predicament of having, by a concatenation,just to _take_ such things: such things as the fact that one very acuteperson in the world, whom he couldn't dispose of as an interestedscoundrel, enjoyed an opinion of him that there was no attacking, nodisproving, no (what was worst of all) even noticing. One had come to aqueer pass when a servant's opinion so mattered. Eugenio's would havemattered even if, as founded on a low vision of appearances, it hadbeen quite wrong. It was the more disagreeable accordingly that thevision of appearances was quite right, and yet was scarcely less low.

  Such as it was, at any rate, Densher shook it off with the moreimpatience that he was independently restless. He had to walk in spiteof weather, and he took his course, through crooked ways, to thePiazza, where he should have the shelter of the galleries. Here, in thehigh arcade, half Venice was crowded close, while, on the Molo, at thelimit of the expanse, the old columns of the Saint Theodore and of theLion were the frame of a door wide open to the storm. It was odd forhim, as he moved, that it should have made such a difference--if thedifference wasn't only that the palace had for the first time failed ofa welcome. There was more, but it came from that; that gave the harshnote and broke the spell. The wet and the cold were now to reckon with,and it was to Densher precisely as if he had seen the obliteration, ata stroke, of the margin on a faith in which they were all living. Themargin had been his name for it--for the thing that, though it had heldout, could bear no shock. The shock, in some form, had come, and hewondered about it while, threading his way among loungers as vague ashimself, he dropped his eyes sightlessly on the rubbish in shops. Therewere stretches of the gallery paved with squares of red marble, greasynow with the salt spray; and the whole place, in its huge elegance, thegrace of its conception and the beauty of its detail, was more thanever like a great drawing-room, the drawing-room of Europe, profanedand bewildered by some reverse of fortune. He brushed shoulders withbrown men whose hats askew, and the loose sleeves of whose pendentjackets, made them resemble melancholy maskers. The tables and chairsthat overflowed from the cafes were gathered, still with a pretence ofservice, into the arcade, and here and there a spectacled German, withhis coat-collar up, partook publicly of food and philosophy. These wereimpressions for Densher too, but he had made the whole circuit thricebefore he stopped short, in front of Florian's, with the force of hissharpest. His eye had caught a face within the cafe--he had spotted anacquaintance behind the glass. The person he had thus paused longenough to look at twice was seated, well within range, at a small tableon which a tumbler, half-emptied and evidently neglected, stillremained; and though he had on his knee, as he leaned back, a copy of aFrench newspaper--the heading of the _Figaro_ was visible--he staredstraight before him at the little opposite rococo wall. Densher had himfor a minute in profile, had him for a time during which his identityproduced, however quickly, all the effect of establishingconnexions--connexions startling and direct; and then, as if it werethe one thing more needed, seized the look, determined by a turn of thehead, that might have been a prompt result of the sense of beingnoticed. This wider view showed him _all_ Lord Mark--Lord Mark asencountered, several weeks before, the day of the first visit of eachto Palazzo Leporelli. For it had been all Lord Mark that was going out,on that occasion, as he came in--he had felt it, in the hall, at thetime; and he was accordingly the less at a loss to recognise in a fewseconds, as renewed meeting brought it to the surface, the samepotential quantity.

  It was a matter, the whole passage--it could only be--but of a fewseconds; for as he might neither stand there to stare nor on the otherhand make any advance from it, he had presently resumed his walk, thistime to another pace. It had been for all the world, during his pause,as if he had caught his answer to the riddle of the day. Lord Mark hadsimply faced him--as he had faced _him_, not placed by him, not atfirst--as one of the damp shuffling crowd. Recognition, though hangingfire, had then clearly come; yet no light of salutation had been struckfrom these certainties. Acquaintance between them was scant enough forneither to take it up. That neither had done so was not, however, whatnow mattered, but that the gentleman at Florian's should be in theplace at all. He couldn't have been in it long; Densher, as inevitablya haunter of the great meeting-ground, would in that case have seen himbefore. He paid short visits; he was on the wing; the question for himeven as he sat there was of his train or of his boat. He had come backfor something--as a sequel to his earlier visit; and whatever he hadcome back for it had had time to be done. He might have arrived butlast
night or that morning; he had already made the difference. It wasa great thing for Densher to get this answer. He held it close, hehugged it, quite leaned on it as he continued to circulate. It kept himgoing and going--it made him no less restless. But it explained--andthat was much, for with explanations he might somehow deal. The vice inthe air, otherwise, was too much like the breath of fate. The weatherhad changed, the rain was ugly, the wind wicked, the sea impossible,_because_ of Lord Mark. It was because of him, _a fortiori_, that thepalace was closed. Densher went round again twice; he found the visitoreach time as he had found him first. Once, that is, he was staringbefore him; the next time he was looking over his _Figaro_, which hehad opened out. Densher didn't again stop, but left him apparentlyunconscious of his passage--on another repetition of which Lord Markhad disappeared. He had spent but the day; he would be off that night;he had now gone to his hotel for arrangements. These things were asplain to Densher as if he had had them in words. The obscure hadcleared for him--if cleared it was; there was something he didn't see,the great thing; but he saw so round it and so close to it that thiswas almost as good. He had been looking at a man who had done what hehad come for, and for whom, as done, it temporarily sufficed. The manhad come again to see Milly, and Milly had received him. His visitwould have taken place just before or just after luncheon, and it wasthe reason why he himself had found her door shut.

  He said to himself that evening, he still said even on the morrow, thathe only wanted a reason, and that with this perception of one he couldnow mind, as he called it, his business. His business, he had settled,as we know, was to keep thoroughly still; and he asked himself why itshould prevent this that he could feel, in connexion with the crisis,so remarkably blameless. He gave the appearances before him all thebenefit of being critical, so that if blame were to accrue he shouldn'tfeel he had dodged it. But it wasn't a bit he who, that day, hadtouched her, and if she was upset it wasn't a bit his act. The abilityso to think about it amounted for Densher during several hours to akind of exhilaration. The exhilaration was heightened fairly, besides,by the visible conditions--sharp, striking, ugly to him--of Lord Mark'sreturn. His constant view of it, for all the next hours, of which therewere many, was as a demonstration on the face of it sinister even tohis own actual ignorance. He didn't need, for seeing it as evil, seeingit as, to a certainty, in a high degree "nasty," to know more about itthan he had so easily and so wonderfully picked up. You couldn't dropon the poor girl that way without, by the fact, being brutal. Such avisit was a descent, an invasion, an aggression, constituting preciselyone or other of the stupid shocks he himself had so decently sought tospare her. Densher had indeed drifted by the next morning to thereflexion--which he positively, with occasion, might have broughtstraight out--that the only delicate and honourable way of treating aperson in such a state was to treat her as _he_, Merton Densher, did.With time, actually--for the impression but deepened--this sense of thecontrast, to the advantage of Merton Densher, became a sense of relief,and that in turn a sense of escape. It was for all the world--and hedrew a long breath on it--as if a special danger for him had passed.Lord Mark had, without in the least intending such a service, got itstraight out of the way. It was _he_, the brute, who had stumbled intojust the wrong inspiration and who had therefore produced, for the veryperson he had wished to hurt, an impunity that was comparativeinnocence, that was almost like purification. The person he had wishedto hurt could only be the person so unaccountably hanging about. Tokeep still meanwhile was, for this person, more comprehensively, tokeep it all up; and to keep it all up was, if that seemed onconsideration best, not, for the day or two, to go back to the palace.

  The day or two passed--stretched to three days; and with the effect,extraordinarily, that Densher felt himself in the course of them washedbut the more clean. Some sign would come if his return should have thebetter effect; and he was at all events, in absence, without theparticular scruple. It wouldn't have been meant for him by either ofthe women that he was to come back but to face Eugenio. That wasimpossible--the being again denied; for it made him practicallyanswerable, and answerable was what he wasn't. There was no neglecteither in absence, inasmuch as, from the moment he didn't get in, theone message he could send up would be some hope on the score of health.Since accordingly that sort of expression was definitely forbidden himhe had only to wait--which he was actually helped to do by his feelingwith the lapse of each day more and more wound up to it. The days inthemselves were anything but sweet; the wind and the weather lasted,the fireless cold hinted at worse; the broken charm of the world aboutwas broken into smaller pieces. He walked up and down his rooms andlistened to the wind--listened also to tinkles of bells and watched forsome servant of the palace. He might get a note, but the note nevercame; there were hours when he stayed at home not to miss it. When hewasn't at home he was in circulation again as he had been at the hourof his seeing Lord Mark. He strolled about the Square with the herd ofrefugees; he raked the approaches and the cafes on the chance thebrute, as he now regularly imaged him, _might_ be still there. He couldonly be there, he knew, to be received afresh; and that--one had but tothink of it--would be indeed stiff. He had gone, however--it wasproved; though Densher's care for the question either way only added towhat was most acrid in the taste of his present ordeal. It all cameround to what he was doing for Milly--spending days that neither reliefnor escape could purge of a smack of the abject. What was it but abjectfor a man of his parts to be reduced to such pastimes? What was it butsordid for him, shuffling about in the rain, to have to peep into shopsand to consider possible meetings? What was it but odious to findhimself wondering what, as between him and another man, a possiblemeeting would produce? There recurred moments when in spite ofeverything he felt no straighter than another man. And yet even on thethird day, when still nothing had come, he more than ever knew that hewouldn't have budged for the world.

  He thought of the two women, in their silence, at last--he at allevents thought of Milly--as probably, for her reasons, now intenselywishing him to go. The cold breath of her reasons was, with everythingelse, in the air; but he didn't care for them any more than for herwish itself, and he would stay in spite of her, stay in spite of odium,stay in spite perhaps of some final experience that would be, for thepain of it, all but unbearable. That would be his one way, purifiedthough he was, to mark his virtue beyond any mistake. It would beaccepting the disagreeable, and the disagreeable would be a proof; aproof of his not having stayed for the thing--the agreeable, as itwere--that Kate had named. The thing Kate had named was not to havebeen the odium of staying in spite of hints. It was part of the odiumas actual too that Kate was, for her comfort, just now well aloof.These were the first hours since her flight in which his sense of whatshe had done for him on the eve of that event was to incur aqualification. It was strange, it was perhaps base, to be thinking suchthings so soon; but one of the intimations of his solitude was that shehad provided for herself. She was out of it all, by her act, as much ashe was in it; and this difference grew, positively, as his ownintensity increased. She had said in their last sharp snatch oftalk--sharp though thickly muffled, and with every word in it final anddeep, unlike even the deepest words they had ever yet spoken: "Letters?Never--_now_. Think of it. Impossible." So that as he had sufficientlycaught her sense--into which he read, all the same, a strangeinconsequence--they had practically wrapped their understanding in thebreach of their correspondence. He had moreover, on losing her, donejustice to her law of silence; for there was doubtless a finer delicacyin his not writing to her than in his writing as he must have writtenhad he spoken of themselves. That would have been a turbid strain, andher idea had been to be noble; which, in a degree, was a manner. Onlyit left her, for the pinch, comparatively at ease. And it left _him_,in the conditions, peculiarly alone. He was alone, that is, till, onthe afternoon of his third day, in gathering dusk and renewed rain,with his shabby rooms looking doubtless, in their confirmed dreariness,for the mere eyes of others, at their worst, the
grinning padrona threwopen the door and introduced Mrs. Stringham. That made at a bound adifference, especially when he saw that his visitor was weighted. Itappeared part of her weight that she was in a wet waterproof, that sheallowed her umbrella to be taken from her by the good woman withoutconsciousness or care, and that her face, under her veil, richly rosywith the driving wind, was--and the veil too--as splashed as if therain were her tears.

  III

  They came to it almost immediately; he was to wonder afterwards at thefewness of their steps. "She has turned her face to the wall."

  "You mean she's worse?"

  The poor lady stood there as she had stopped; Densher had, in theinstant flare of his eagerness, his curiosity, all responsive at sightof her, waved away, on the spot, the padrona, who had offered torelieve her of her mackintosh. She looked vaguely about through her wetveil, intensely alive now to the step she had taken and wishing it notto have been in the dark, but clearly, as yet, seeing nothing. "I don'tknow _how_ she is--and it's why I've come to you."

  "I'm glad enough you've come," he said, "and it's quite--you make mefeel--as if I had been wretchedly waiting for you."

  She showed him again her blurred eyes--she had caught at his word."Have you been wretched?"

  Now, however, on his lips, the word expired. It would have sounded forhim like a complaint, and before something he already made out in hisvisitor he knew his own trouble as small. Hers, under her dampdraperies, which shamed his lack of a fire, was great, and he felt shehad brought it all with her. He answered that he had been patient andabove all that he had been still. "As still as a mouse--you'll haveseen it for yourself. Stiller, for three days together, than I've everbeen in my life. It has seemed to me the only thing."

  This qualification of it as a policy or a remedy was straightway forhis friend, he saw, a light that her own light could answer. "It hasbeen best. I've wondered for you. But it has been best," she said again.

  "Yet it has done no good?"

  "I don't know. I've been afraid you were gone." Then as he gave aheadshake which, though slow, was deeply mature: "You _won't_ go?"

  "Is to 'go,'" he asked, "to be still?"

  "Oh I mean if you'll stay for me."

  "I'll do anything for you. Isn't it for you alone now I can?"

  She thought of it, and he could see even more of the relief she wastaking from him. His presence, his face, his voice, the old roomsthemselves, so meagre yet so charged, where Kate had admirably been tohim--these things counted for her, now she had them, as the help shehad been wanting: so that she still only stood there taking them allin. With it however popped up characteristically a throb of herconscience. What she thus tasted was almost a personal joy. It toldDensher of the three days she on her side had spent. "Well, anythingyou do for me--_is_ for her too. Only, only--!"

  "Only nothing now matters?"

  She looked at him a minute as if he were the fact itself that heexpressed. "Then you know?"

  "Is she dying?" he asked for all answer.

  Mrs. Stringham waited--her face seemed to sound him. Then her own replywas strange. "She hasn't so much as named you. We haven't spoken."

  "Not for three days?"

  "No more," she simply went on, "than if it were all over. Not even bythe faintest allusion."

  "Oh," said Densher with more light, "you mean you haven't spoken about_me?_"

  "About what else? No more than if you were dead."

  "Well," he answered after a moment, "I _am_ dead."

  "Then I am," said Susan Shepherd with a drop of her arms on herwaterproof.

  It was a tone that, for the minute, imposed itself in its dry despair;it represented, in the bleak place, which had no life of its own, nonebut the life Kate had left--the sense of which, for that matter, bymystic channels, might fairly be reaching the visitor--the veryimpotence of their extinction. And Densher had nothing to oppose itwithal, nothing but again: "Is she dying?"

  It made her, however, as if these were crudities, almost materialpangs, only say as before: "Then you know?"

  "Yes," he at last returned, "I know. But the marvel to me is that _you_do. I've no right in fact to imagine or to assume that you do."

  "You may," said Susan Shepherd, "all the same. I know."

  "Everything?"

  Her eyes, through her veil, kept pressing him. "No--not everything.That's why I've come."

  "That I shall really tell you?" With which, as she hesitated and itaffected him, he brought out in a groan a doubting "Oh, oh!" It turnedhim from her to the place itself, which was a part of what was in him,was the abode, the worn shrine more than ever, of the fact inpossession, the fact, now a thick association, for which he had hiredit. _That_ was not for telling, but Susan Shepherd was, none the less,so decidedly wonderful that the sense of it might really have begun, byan effect already operating, to be a part of her knowledge. He saw, andit stirred him, that she hadn't come to judge him; had come rather, sofar as she might dare, to pity. This showed him her ownabasement--that, at any rate, of grief; and made him feel with a rushof friendliness that he liked to be with her. The rush had quickenedwhen she met his groan with an attenuation.

  "We shall at all events--if that's anything--be together."

  It was his own good impulse in herself. "It's what I've ventured tofeel. It's much." She replied in effect, silently, that it was whateverhe liked; on which, so far as he had been afraid for anything, he knewhis fear had dropped. The comfort was huge, for it gave back to himsomething precious, over which, in the effort of recovery, his own handhad too imperfectly closed. Kate, he remembered, had said to him, withher sole and single boldness--and also on grounds he hadn't thenmeasured--that Mrs. Stringham was a person who _wouldn't_, at a pinch,in a stretch of confidence, wince. It was but another of the cases inwhich Kate was always showing. "You don't think then very horridly ofme?"

  And her answer was the more valuable that it came without nervouseffusion--quite as if she understood what he might conceivably havebelieved. She turned over in fact what she thought, and that was whathelped him. "Oh you've been extraordinary!"

  It made him aware the next moment of how they had been planted there.She took off her cloak with his aid, though when she had also,accepting a seat, removed her veil, he recognised in her personalravage that the words she had just uttered to him were the one flowershe had to throw. They were all her consolation for him, and theconsolation even still depended on the event. She sat with him at anyrate in the grey clearance, as sad as a winter dawn, made by theirmeeting. The image she again evoked for him loomed in it but thelarger. "She has turned her face to the wall."

  He saw with the last vividness, and it was as if, in their silences,they were simply so leaving what he saw. "She doesn't speak at all? Idon't mean not of me."

  "Of nothing--of no one." And she went on, Susan Shepherd, giving it outas she had had to take it. "She doesn't _want_ to die. Think of herage. Think of her goodness. Think of her beauty. Think of all she is.Think of all she _has_. She lies there stiffening herself and clingingto it all. So I thank God--!" the poor lady wound up with a waninconsequence.

  He wondered. "You thank God--?"

  "That she's so quiet."

  He continued to wonder. "_Is_ she so quiet?"

  "She's more than quiet. She's grim. It's what she has never been. Soyou see--all these days. I can't tell you--but it's better so. It wouldkill me if she _were_ to tell me."

  "To tell you?" He was still at a loss.

  "How she feels. How she clings. How she doesn't want it."

  "How she doesn't want to die? Of course she doesn't want it." He had along pause, and they might have been thinking together of what theycould even now do to prevent it. This, however, was not what he broughtout. Milly's "grimness" and the great hushed palace were present tohim; present with the little woman before him as she must have beenwaiting there and listening. "Only, what harm have _you_ done her?"

  Mrs. Stringham looked about in her darkness. "I don't know. I come
andtalk of her here with you."

  It made him again hesitate. "Does she utterly hate me?"

  "I don't know. How _can_ I? No one ever will."

  "She'll never tell?"

  "She'll never tell."

  Once more he thought. "She must be magnificent."

  "She _is_ magnificent."

  His friend, after all, helped him, and he turned it, so far as hecould, all over. "Would she see me again?"

  It made his companion stare. "Should you like to see her?"

  "You mean as you describe her?" He felt her surprise, and it took himsome time. "No."

  "Ah then!" Mrs. Stringham sighed.

  "But if she could bear it I'd do anything."

  She had for the moment her vision of this, but it collapsed. "I don'tsee what you can do."

  "I don't either. But _she_ might."

  Mrs. Stringham continued to think. "It's too late."

  "Too late for her to see--?"

  "Too late."

  The very decision of her despair--it was after all so lucid--kindled inhim a heat. "But the doctor, all the while--?"

  "Tacchini? Oh he's kind. He comes. He's proud of having been approvedand coached by a great London man. He hardly in fact goes away; so thatI scarce know what becomes of his other patients. He thinks her, justlyenough, a great personage; he treats her like royalty; he's waiting onevents. But she has barely consented to see him, and, though she hastold him, generously--for she _thinks_ of me, dear creature--that hemay come, that he may stay, for my sake, he spends most of his timeonly hovering at her door, prowling through the rooms, trying toentertain me, in that ghastly saloon, with the gossip of Venice, andmeeting me, in doorways, in the sala, on the staircase, with anagreeable intolerable smile. We don't," said Susan Shepherd, "talk ofher."

  "By her request?"

  "Absolutely. I don't do what she doesn't wish. We talk of the price ofprovisions."

  "By her request too?"

  "Absolutely. She named it to me as a subject when she said, the firsttime, that if it would be any comfort to me he might stay as much as weliked."

  Densher took it all in. "But he isn't any comfort to you!"

  "None whatever. That, however," she added, "isn't his fault. Nothing'sany comfort."

  "Certainly," Densher observed, "as I but too horribly feel, _I'm_ not."

  "No. But I didn't come for that."

  "You came for _me_."

  "Well then call it that." But she looked at him a moment with eyesfilled full, and something came up in her the next instant from deeperstill. "I came at bottom of course--"

  "You came at bottom of course for our friend herself. But if it's, asyou say, too late for me to do anything?"

  She continued to look at him, and with an irritation, which he saw growin her, from the truth itself. "So I did say. But, with you here"--andshe turned her vision again strangely about her--"with you here, andwith everything, I feel we mustn't abandon her."

  "God forbid we should abandon her."

  "Then you _won't?_" His tone had made her flush again.

  "How do you mean I 'won't,' if she abandons _me?_ What can I do if shewon't see me?"

  "But you said just now you wouldn't like it."

  "I said I shouldn't like it in the light of what you tell me. Ishouldn't like it only to see her as you make me. I should like it if Icould help her. But even then," Densher pursued without faith, "shewould have to want it first herself. And there," he continued to makeout, "is the devil of it. She _won't_ want it herself. She _can't!_"

  He had got up in his impatience of it, and she watched him while hehelplessly moved. "There's one thing you can do. There's only that, andeven for that there are difficulties. But there _is_ that." He stoodbefore her with his hands in his pockets, and he had soon enough, fromher eyes, seen what was coming. She paused as if waiting for his leaveto utter it, and as he only let her wait they heard in the silence, onthe Canal, the renewed downpour of rain. She had at last to speak, but,as if still with her fear, she only half-spoke. "I think you reallyknow yourself what it is."

  He did know what it was, and with it even, as she said--rather!--therewere difficulties. He turned away on them, on everything, for a moment;he moved to the other window and looked at the sheeted channel, wider,like a river, where the houses opposite, blurred and belittled, stoodat twice their distance. Mrs. Stringham said nothing, was as mute infact, for the minute, as if she had "had" him, and he was the firstagain to speak. When he did so, however, it was not in straight answerto her last remark--he only started from that. He said, as he came backto her, "Let me, you know, _see_--one must understand," almost as if hehad for the time accepted it. And what he wished to understand waswhere, on the essence of the question, was the voice of Sir LukeStrett. If they talked of not giving her up shouldn't _he_ be the oneleast of all to do it? "Aren't we, at the worst, in the dark withouthim?"

  "Oh," said Mrs. Stringham, "it's he who has kept me going. I wired thefirst night, and he answered like an angel. He'll come like one. Onlyhe can't arrive, at the nearest, till Thursday afternoon."

  "Well then that's something."

  She considered. "Something--yes. She likes him."

  "Rather! I can see it still, the face with which, when he was here inOctober--that night when she was in white, when she had people thereand those musicians--she committed him to my care. It was beautiful forboth of us--she put us in relation. She asked me, for the time, to takehim about; I did so, and we quite hit it off. That proved," Denshersaid with a quick sad smile, "that she liked him."

  "He liked _you_," Susan Shepherd presently risked.

  "Ah I know nothing about that."

  "You ought to then. He went with you to galleries and churches; yousaved his time for him, showed him the choicest things, and you perhapswill remember telling me myself that if he hadn't been a great surgeonhe might really have been a great judge. I mean of the beautiful."

  "Well," the young man admitted, "that's what he is--in having judged_her_. He hasn't," he went on, "judged her for nothing. His interest inher--which we must make the most of--can only be supremely beneficent."

  He still roamed, while he spoke, with his hands in his pockets, and shesaw him, on this, as her eyes sufficiently betrayed, trying to keep hisdistance from the recognition he had a few moments before partlyconfessed to. "I'm glad," she dropped, "you like him!"

  There was something for him in the sound of it. "Well, I do no more,dear lady, than you do yourself. Surely _you_ like him. Surely, when hewas here, we all liked him."

  "Yes, but I seem to feel I know what he thinks. And I should think,with all the time you spent with him, you'd know it," she said,"yourself."

  Densher stopped short, though at first without a word. "We never spokeof her. Neither of us mentioned her, even to sound her name, andnothing whatever in connexion with her passed between us."

  Mrs. Stringham stared up at him, surprised at this picture. But she hadplainly an idea that after an instant resisted it. "That was hisprofessional propriety."

  "Precisely. But it was also my sense of that virtue in him, and it wassomething more besides." And he spoke with sudden intensity. "Icouldn't _talk_ to him about her!"

  "Oh!" said Susan Shepherd.

  "I can't talk to any one about her."

  "Except to _me_," his friend continued.

  "Except to you." The ghost of her smile, a gleam of significance, hadwaited on her words, and it kept him, for honesty, looking at her. Forhonesty too--that is for his own words--he had quickly coloured: he wassinking so, at a stroke, the burden of his discourse with Kate. Hisvisitor, for the minute, while their eyes met, might have been watchinghim hold it down. And he _had_ to hold it down--the effort of which,precisely, made him red. He couldn't let it come up; at least not yet.She might make what she would of it. He attempted to repeat hisstatement, but he really modified it. "Sir Luke, at all events, hadnothing to tell me, and I had nothing to tell him. Make-believe talkwas impossible for us, and--"
>
  "And _real_"--she had taken him right up with a huge emphasis--"wasmore impossible still." No doubt--he didn't deny it; and she hadstraightway drawn her conclusion. "Then that proves what I say--thatthere were immensities between you. Otherwise you'd have chattered."

  "I dare say," Densher granted, "we were both thinking of her."

  "You were neither of you thinking of any one else. That's why you kepttogether."

  Well, that too, if she desired, he took from her; but he came straightback to what he had originally said. "I haven't a notion, all the same,of what he thinks." She faced him, visibly, with the question intowhich he had already observed that her special shade of earnestness wasperpetually flowering, right and left--"Are you _very_ sure?"--and hecould only note her apparent difference from himself. "You, I judge,believe that he thinks she's gone."

  She took it, but she bore up. "It doesn't matter what I believe."

  "Well, we shall see"--and he felt almost basely superficial. More andmore, for the last five minutes, had he known she had brought somethingwith her, and never in respect to anything had he had such a wish topostpone. He would have liked to put everything off till Thursday; hewas sorry it was now Tuesday; he wondered if he were afraid. Yet itwasn't of Sir Luke, who was coming; nor of Milly, who was dying; nor ofMrs. Stringham, who was sitting there. It wasn't, strange to say, ofKate either, for Kate's presence affected him suddenly as havingswooned or trembled away. Susan Shepherd's, thus prolonged, had cast onit some influence under which it had ceased to act. She was as absentto his sensibility as she had constantly been, since her departure,absent, as an echo or a reference, from the palace; and it was thefirst time, among the objects now surrounding him, that his sensibilityso noted her. He knew soon enough that it was of himself he was afraid,and that even, if he didn't take care, he should infallibly be more so."Meanwhile," he added for his companion, "it has been everything for meto see you." She slowly rose at the words, which might almost haveconveyed to her the hint of his taking care. She stood there as if shehad in fact seen him abruptly moved to dismiss her. But the abruptnesswould have been in this case so marked as fairly to offer ground forinsistence to her imagination of his state. It would take her moreover,she clearly showed him she was thinking, but a minute or two to insist.Besides, she had already said it. "Will you do it if _he_ asks you? Imean if Sir Luke himself puts it to you. And will you give him"--oh shewas earnest now!--"the opportunity to put it to you?"

  "The opportunity to put what?"

  "That if you deny it to her, that may still do something."

  Densher felt himself--as had already once befallen him in the quarterof an hour--turn red to the top of his forehead. Turning red had,however, for him, as a sign of shame, been, so to speak, discounted:his consciousness of it at the present moment was rather as a sign ofhis fear. It showed him sharply enough of what he was afraid. "If Ideny what to her?"

  Hesitation, on the demand, revived in her, for hadn't he all along beenletting her see that he knew? "Why, what Lord Mark told her."

  "And what did Lord Mark tell her?"

  Mrs. Stringham had a look of bewilderment--of seeing him as suddenlyperverse. "I've been judging that you yourself know." And it was shewho now blushed deep.

  It quickened his pity for her, but he was beset too by other things."Then _you_ know--"

  "Of his dreadful visit?" She stared. "Why it's what has done it."

  "Yes--I understand that. But you also know--"

  He had faltered again, but all she knew she now wanted to say. "I'mspeaking," she said soothingly, "of what he told her. It's _that_ thatI've taken you as knowing."

  "Oh!" he sounded in spite of himself.

  It appeared to have for her, he saw the next moment, the quality ofrelief, as if he had supposed her thinking of something else.Thereupon, straightway, that lightened it. "Oh you thought I've knownit for _true!_"

  Her light had heightened her flush, and he saw that he had betrayedhimself. Not, however, that it mattered, as he immediately saw stillbetter. There it was now, all of it at last, and this at least therewas no postponing. They were left with her idea--the one she waswishing to make him recognise. He had expressed ten minutes before hisneed to understand, and she was acting after all but on that. Only whathe was to understand was no small matter; it might be larger even thanas yet appeared.

  He took again one of his turns, not meeting what she had last said; hemooned a minute, as he would have called it, at a window; and of courseshe could see that she had driven him to the wall. She did clearly,without delay, see it; on which her sense of having "caught" him becameas promptly a scruple, which she spoke as if not to press. "What I meanis that he told her you've been all the while engaged to Miss Croy."

  He gave a jerk round; it was almost--to hear it--the touch of a lash;and he said--idiotically, as he afterwards knew--the first thing thatcame into his head. "All _what_ while?"

  "Oh it's not I who say it." She spoke in gentleness. "I only repeat toyou what he told her."

  Densher, from whom an impatience had escaped, had already caughthimself up. "Pardon my brutality. Of course I know what you're talkingabout. I saw him, toward the evening," he further explained, "in thePiazza; only just saw him--through the glass at Florian's--without anywords. In fact I scarcely know him--there wouldn't have been occasion.It was but once, moreover--he must have gone that night. But I knew hewouldn't have come for nothing, and I turned it over--what he wouldhave come for."

  Oh so had Mrs. Stringham. "He came for exasperation."

  Densher approved. "He came to let her know that he knows better thanshe for whom it was she had a couple of months before, in her fool'sparadise, refused him."

  "How you _do_ know!"--and Mrs. Stringham almost smiled.

  "I know that--but I don't know the good it does him."

  "The good, he thinks, if he has patience--not too much--may be to come.He doesn't know what he has done to her. Only _we_, you see, do that."

  He saw, but he wondered. "She kept from him--what she felt?"

  "She was able--I'm sure of it--not to show anything. He dealt her hisblow, and she took it without a sign." Mrs. Stringham, it was plain,spoke by book, and it brought into play again her appreciation of whatshe related. "She's magnificent."

  Densher again gravely assented. "Magnificent!"

  "And _he_," she went on, "is an idiot of idiots."

  "An idiot of idiots." For a moment, on it all, on the stupid doom init, they looked at each other. "Yet he's thought so awfully clever."

  "So awfully--it's Maud Lowder's own view. And he was nice, in London,"said Mrs. Stringham, "to _me_. One could almost pity him--he has hadsuch a good conscience."

  "That's exactly the inevitable ass."

  "Yes, but it wasn't--I could see from the only few things she firsttold me--that he meant _her_ the least harm. He intended none whatever."

  "That's always the ass at his worst," Densher returned. "He only ofcourse meant harm to me."

  "And good to himself--he thought that would come. He had been unable toswallow," Mrs. Stringham pursued, "what had happened on his othervisit. He had been then too sharply humiliated."

  "Oh I saw that."

  "Yes, and he also saw you. He saw you received, as it were, while hewas turned away."

  "Perfectly," Densher said--"I've filled it out. And also that he hasknown meanwhile for _what_ I was then received. For a stay of all theseweeks. He had had it to think of."

  "Precisely--it was more than he could bear. But he has it," said Mrs.Stringham, "to think of still."

  "Only, after all," asked Densher, who himself somehow, at this point,was having more to think of even than he had yet had--"only, after all,how has he happened to know? That is, to know enough."

  "What do you call enough?" Mrs. Stringham enquired.

  "He can only have acted--it would have been his sole safety--from fullknowledge."

  He had gone on without heeding her question; but, face to face as theywere, something had n
one the less passed between them. It was thisthat, after an instant, made her again interrogative. "What do you meanby full knowledge?"

  Densher met it indirectly. "Where has he been since October?"

  "I think he has been back to England. He came in fact, I've reason tobelieve, straight from there."

  "Straight to do this job? All the way for his half-hour?"

  "Well, to try again--with the help perhaps of a new fact. To makehimself possibly right with her--a different attempt from the other. Hehad at any rate something to tell her, and he didn't know hisopportunity would reduce itself to half an hour. Or perhaps indeed halfan hour would be just what was most effective. It _has_ been!" saidSusan Shepherd.

  Her companion took it in, understanding but too well; yet as shelighted the matter for him more, really, than his own courage had quitedared--putting the absent dots on several i's--he saw new questionsswarm. They had been till now in a bunch, entangled and confused; andthey fell apart, each showing for itself. The first he put to her wasat any rate abrupt. "Have you heard of late from Mrs. Lowder."

  "Oh yes, two or three times. She depends naturally upon news of Milly."

  He hesitated. "And does she depend, naturally, upon news of _me?_"

  His friend matched for an instant his deliberation.

  "I've given her none that hasn't been decently good. This will havebeen the first."

  "'This'?" Densher was thinking.

  "Lord Mark's having been here, and her being as she is."

  He thought a moment longer. "What has Mrs. Lowder written about him?Has she written that he has been with them?"

  "She has mentioned him but once--it was in her letter before the last.Then she said something."

  "And what did she say?"

  Mrs. Stringham produced it with an effort. "Well it was in reference toMiss Croy. That she thought Kate was thinking of him. Or perhaps Ishould say rather that he was thinking of _her_--only it seemed thistime to have struck Maud that he was seeing the way more open to him."

  Densher listened with his eyes on the ground, but he presently raisedthem to speak, and there was that in his face which proved him aware ofa queerness in his question. "Does she mean he has been encouraged to_propose_ to her niece?"

  "I don't know what she means."

  "Of course not"--he recovered himself; "and I oughtn't to seem totrouble you to piece together what I can't piece myself. Only I'guess,'" he added, "I _can_ piece it."

  She spoke a little timidly, but she risked it. "I dare say I can pieceit too."

  It was one of the things in her--and his conscious face took it fromher as such--that from the moment of her coming in had seemed to markfor him, as to what concerned him, the long jump of her perception.They had parted four days earlier with many things, between them, deepdown. But these things were now on their troubled surface, and itwasn't he who had brought them so quickly up. Women were wonderful--atleast this one was. But so, not less, was Milly, was Aunt Maud; so,most of all, was his very Kate. Well, he already knew what he had beenfeeling about the circle of petticoats. They were all _such_petticoats! It was just the fineness of his tangle. The sense of that,in its turn, for us too, might have been not unconnected with hisputting to his visitor a question that quite passed over her remark."Has Miss Croy meanwhile written to our friend?"

  "Oh," Mrs. Stringham amended, "_her_ friend also. But not a single wordthat I know of."

  He had taken it for certain she hadn't--the thing being after all but ashade more strange than his having himself, with Milly, never for sixweeks mentioned the young lady in question. It was for that matter buta shade more strange than Milly's not having mentioned her. In spite ofwhich, and however inconsequently, he blushed anew for Kate's silence.He got away from it in fact as quickly as possible, and the furthest hecould get was by reverting for a minute to the man they had beenjudging. "How did he manage to get _at_ her? She had only--with whathad passed between them before--to say she couldn't see him."

  "Oh she was disposed to kindness. She was easier," the good ladyexplained with a slight embarrassment, "than at the other time."

  "Easier?"

  "She was off her guard. There was a difference."

  "Yes. But exactly not _the_ difference."

  "Exactly not the difference of her having to be harsh. Perfectly. Shecould afford to be the opposite." With which, as he said nothing, shejust impatiently completed her sense. "She had had _you_ here for sixweeks."

  "Oh!" Densher softly groaned.

  "Besides, I think he must have written her first--written I mean in atone to smooth his way. That it would be a kindness to himself. Then onthe spot--"

  "On the spot," Densher broke in, "he unmasked? The horrid little beast!"

  It made Susan Shepherd turn slightly pale, though quickening, as forhope, the intensity of her look at him. "Oh he went off without analarm."

  "And he must have gone off also without a hope."

  "Ah that, certainly."

  "Then it _was_ mere base revenge. Hasn't he known her, into thebargain," the young man asked--"didn't he, weeks before, see her, judgeher, feel her, as having for such a suit as his not more perhaps than afew months to live?"

  Mrs. Stringham at first, for reply, but looked at him in silence; andit gave more force to what she then remarkably added. "He has doubtlessbeen aware of what you speak of, just as you have yourself been aware."

  "He has wanted her, you mean, just _because_--?"

  "Just because," said Susan Shepherd.

  "The hound!" Merton Densher brought out. He moved off, however, with ahot face, as soon as he had spoken, conscious again of an intention inhis visitor's reserve. Dusk was now deeper, and after he had once moretaken counsel of the dreariness without he turned to his companion."Shall we have lights--a lamp or the candles?"

  "Not for me."

  "Nothing?"

  "Not for me."

  He waited at the window another moment and then faced his friend with athought. "He _will_ have proposed to Miss Croy. That's what hashappened."

  Her reserve continued. "It's you who must judge."

  "Well, I do judge. Mrs. Lowder will have done so too--only _she_, poorlady, wrong. Miss Croy's refusal of him will have struck him"--Denshercontinued to make it out--"as a phenomenon requiring a reason."

  "And you've been clear to him _as_ the reason?"

  "Not too clear--since I'm sticking here and since that has been a factto make his descent on Miss Theale relevant. But clear enough. He hasbelieved," said Densher bravely, "that I may have been a reason atLancaster Gate, and yet at the same time have been up to something inVenice."

  Mrs. Stringham took her courage from his own. "'Up to' something? Up towhat?"

  "God knows. To some 'game,' as they say. To some deviltry. To someduplicity."

  "Which of course," Mrs. Stringham observed, "is a monstroussupposition." Her companion, after a stiff minute--sensibly long foreach--fell away from her again, and then added to it another minute,which he spent once more looking out with his hands in his pockets.This was no answer, he perfectly knew, to what she had dropped, and iteven seemed to state for his own ears that no answer was possible. Sheleft him to himself, and he was glad she had declined, for theirfurther colloquy, the advantage of lights. These would have been anadvantage mainly to herself. Yet she got her benefit too even from theabsence of them. It came out in her very tone when at last sheaddressed him--so differently, for confidence--in words she had alreadyused. "If Sir Luke himself asks it of you as something you can do for_him_, will you deny to Milly herself what she has been made sodreadfully to believe?"

  Oh how he knew he hung back! But at last he said: "You're absolutelycertain then that she does believe it?"

  "Certain?" She appealed to their whole situation. "Judge!"

  He took his time again to judge. "Do _you_ believe it?"

  He was conscious that his own appeal pressed her hard; it eased him alittle that her answer must be a pain to her discretion. She answer
ednone the less, and he was truly the harder pressed. "What I believewill inevitably depend more or less on your action. You can perfectlysettle it--if you care. I promise to believe you down to the ground if,to save her life, you consent to a denial."

  "But a denial, when it comes to that--confound the whole thing, don'tyou see!--of exactly what?"

  It was as if he were hoping she would narrow; but in fact she enlarged."Of everything."

  Everything had never even yet seemed to him so incalculably much. "Oh!"he simply moaned into the gloom.

  IV

  The near Thursday, coming nearer and bringing Sir Luke Strett, broughtalso blessedly an abatement of other rigours. The weather changed, thestubborn storm yielded, and the autumn sunshine, baffled for many days,but now hot and almost vindictive, came into its own again and, with analmost audible paean, a suffusion of bright sound that was one with thebright colour, took large possession. Venice glowed and plashed andcalled and chimed again; the air was like a clap of hands, and thescattered pinks, yellows, blues, sea-greens, were like a hanging-out ofvivid stuffs, a laying-down of fine carpets. Densher rejoiced in thison the occasion of his going to the station to meet the great doctor.He went after consideration, which, as he was constantly aware, was atpresent his imposed, his only, way of doing anything. That was wherethe event had landed him--where no event in his life had landed himbefore. He had thought, no doubt, from the day he was born, much morethan he had acted; except indeed that he remembered thoughts--a few ofthem--which at the moment of their coming to him had thrilled himalmost like adventures. But anything like his actual state he had not,as to the prohibition of impulse, accident, range--the prohibition inother words of freedom--hitherto known. The great oddity was that if hehad felt his arrival, so few weeks back, especially as an adventure,nothing could now less resemble one than the fact of his staying. Itwould be an adventure to break away, to depart, to go back, above all,to London, and tell Kate Croy he had done so; but there was somethingof the merely, the almost meanly, obliged and involved sort in hisgoing on as he was. That was the effect in particular of Mrs.Stringham's visit, which had left him as with such a taste in his mouthof what he couldn't do. It had made this quantity clear to him, and yethad deprived him of the sense, the other sense, of what, for a refuge,he possibly _could_.

  It was but a small make-believe of freedom, he knew, to go to thestation for Sir Luke. Nothing equally free, at all events, had he yetturned over so long. What then was his odious position but that againand again he was afraid? He stiffened himself under this consciousnessas if it had been a tax levied by a tyrant. He hadn't at any timeproposed to himself to live long enough for fear to preponderate in hislife. Such was simply the advantage it had actually got of him. He wasafraid for instance that an advance to his distinguished friend mightprove for him somehow a pledge or a committal. He was afraid of it as acurrent that would draw him too far; yet he thought with an equalaversion of being shabby, being poor, through fear. What finallyprevailed with him was the reflexion that, whatever might happen, thegreat man had, after that occasion at the palace, their young woman'sbrief sacrifice to society--and the hour of Mrs. Stringham's appeal hadbrought it well to the surface--shown him marked benevolence. Mrs.Stringham's comments on the relation in which Milly had placed themmade him--it was unmistakeable--feel things he perhaps hadn't felt. Itwas in the spirit of seeking a chance to feel again adequately whateverit was he had missed--it was, no doubt, in that spirit, so far as itwent a stroke for freedom, that Densher, arriving betimes, paced theplatform before the train came in. Only, after it had come and he hadpresented himself at the door of Sir Luke's compartment with everythingthat followed--only, as the situation developed, the sense of ananti-climax to so many intensities deprived his apprehensions andhesitations even of the scant dignity they might claim. He could scarcehave said if the visitor's manner less showed the remembrance thatmight have suggested expectation, or made shorter work of surprise inpresence of the fact.

  Sir Luke had clean forgotten--so Densher read--the rather remarkableyoung man he had formerly gone about with, though he picked him upagain, on the spot, with one large quiet look. The young man felthimself so picked, and the thing immediately affected him as the proofof a splendid economy. Opposed to all the waste with which he was nowconnected the exhibition was of a nature quite nobly to admonish him.The eminent pilgrim, in the train, all the way, had used the hours ashe needed, thinking not a moment in advance of what finally awaitedhim. An exquisite case awaited him--of which, in this queer way, theremarkable young man was an outlying part; but the single motion of hisface, the motion into which Densher, from the platform, lightly stirredits stillness, was his first renewed cognition. If, however, he hadsuppressed the matter by leaving Victoria he would at once suppressnow, in turn, whatever else suited. The perception of this became as asymbol of the whole pitch, so far as one might one's self be concerned,of his visit. One saw, our friend further meditated, everything that,in contact, he appeared to accept--if only, for much, not to trouble tosink it: what one missed was the inward use he made of it. Densherbegan wondering, at the great water-steps outside, what use he wouldmake of the anomaly of their having there to separate. Eugenio had beenon the platform, in the respectful rear, and the gondola from thepalace, under his direction, bestirred itself, with its attachingmixture of alacrity and dignity, on their coming out of the stationtogether. Densher didn't at all mind now that, he himself of necessityrefusing a seat on the deep black cushions beside the guest of thepalace, he had Milly's three emissaries for spectators; and thissusceptibility, he also knew, it was something to have left behind. Allhe did was to smile down vaguely from the steps--they could see him,the donkeys, as shut out as they would. "I don't," he said with a sadheadshake, "go there now."

  "Oh!" Sir Luke Strett returned, and made no more of it; so that thething was splendid, Densher fairly thought, as an inscrutability quiteinevitable and unconscious. His friend appeared not even to make of itthat he supposed it might be for respect to the crisis. He didn'tmoreover afterwards make much more of anything--after the classiccraft, that is, obeying in the main Pasquale's inimitable stroke fromthe poop, had performed the manoeuvre by which it presented, receding,a back, so to speak, rendered positively graceful by the high blackhump of its _felze_. Densher watched the gondola out of sight--he heardPasquale's cry, borne to him across the water, for the sharp firmswerve into a side-canal, a short cut to the palace. He had no gondolaof his own; it was his habit never to take one; and he humbly--as inVenice it _is_ humble--walked away, though not without having for sometime longer stood as if fixed where the guest of the palace had lefthim. It was strange enough, but he found himself as never yet, and ashe couldn't have reckoned, in presence of the truth that was the truestabout Milly. He couldn't have reckoned on the force of the differenceinstantly made--for it was all in the air as he heard Pasquale's cryand saw the boat disappear--by the mere visibility, on the spot, of thepersonage summoned to her aid. He hadn't only never been near the factsof her condition--which counted so as a blessing for him; he hadn'tonly, with all the world, hovered outside an impenetrable ring fence,within which there reigned a kind of expensive vagueness made up ofsmiles and silences and beautiful fictions and priceless arrangements,all strained to breaking; but he had also, with every one else, as henow felt, actively fostered suppressions which were in the directinterest of every one's good manner, every one's pity, every one'sreally quite generous ideal. It was a conspiracy of silence, as the_cliche_ went, to which no one had made an exception, the great smudgeof mortality across the picture, the shadow of pain and horror, findingin no quarter a surface of spirit or of speech that consented toreflect it. "The mere aesthetic instinct of mankind--!" our young manhad more than once, in the connexion, said to himself; letting the restof the proposition drop, but touching again thus sufficiently on theoutrage even to taste involved in one's having to _see_. So then it hadbeen--a general conscious fool's paradise, from which the specified hadbeen chased like
a dangerous animal. What therefore had at presentbefallen was that the specified, standing all the while at the gate,had now crossed the threshold as in Sir Luke Strett's person and quiteon such a scale as to fill out the whole precinct. Densher's nerves,absolutely his heart-beats too, had measured the change before he onthis occasion moved away.

  The facts of physical suffering, of incurable pain, of the chancegrimly narrowed, had been made, at a stroke, intense, and this was tobe the way he was now to feel them. The clearance of the air, in short,making vision not only possible but inevitable, the one thing left tobe thankful for was the breadth of Sir Luke's shoulders, which, shouldone be able to keep in line with them, might in some degree interpose.It was, however, far from plain to Densher for the first day or twothat he was again to see his distinguished friend at all. That hecouldn't, on any basis actually serving, return to the palace--this wasas solid to him, every whit, as the other feature of his case, the factof the publicity attaching to his proscription through his not havingtaken himself off. He had been seen often enough in the Leporelligondola. As, accordingly, he was not on any presumption destined tomeet Sir Luke about the town, where the latter would have neither timenor taste to lounge, nothing more would occur between them unless thegreat man should surprisingly wait upon him. His doing that, Densherfurther reflected, wouldn't even simply depend on Mrs. Stringham'shaving decided to--as they might say--turn him on. It would depend aswell--for there would be practically some difference to her--on heractually attempting it; and it would depend above all on what Sir Lukewould make of such an overture. Densher had for that matter his ownview of the amount, to say nothing of the particular sort, of responseit might expect from him. He had his own view of the ability of such apersonage even to understand such an appeal. To what extent could he beprepared, and what importance in fine could he attach? Densher askedhimself these questions, in truth, to put his own position at theworst. He should miss the great man completely unless the great manshould come to see him, and the great man could only come to see himfor a purpose unsupposable. Therefore he wouldn't come at all, andconsequently there was nothing to hope.

  It wasn't in the least that Densher invoked this violence to allprobability; but it pressed on him that there were few possiblediversions he could afford now to miss. Nothing in his predicament wasso odd as that, incontestably afraid of himself, he was not afraid ofSir Luke. He had an impression, which he clung to, based on a previoustaste of the visitor's company, that _he_ would somehow let him off.The truth about Milly perched on his shoulders and sounded in histread, became by the fact of his presence the name and the form, forthe time, of everything in the place; but it didn't, for thedifference, sit in his face, the face so squarely and easily turned toDensher at the earlier season. His presence on the first occasion, notas the result of a summons, but as a friendly whim of his own, had hadquite another value; and though our young man could scarce regard thatvalue as recoverable he yet reached out in imagination to a renewal ofthe old contact. He didn't propose, as he privately and forciblyphrased the matter, to be a hog; but there was something he after alldid want for himself. It was something--this stuck to him--that SirLuke would have had for him if it hadn't been impossible. These werehis worst days, the two or three; those on which even the sense of thetension at the palace didn't much help him not to feel that his destinymade but light of him. He had never been, as he judged it, so down. Inmean conditions, without books, without society, almost without money,he had nothing to do but to wait. His main support really was hisoriginal idea, which didn't leave him, of waiting for the deepest depthhis predicament could sink him to. Fate would invent, if he but gave ittime, some refinement of the horrible. It was just inventing meanwhilethis suppression of Sir Luke. When the third day came without a sign heknew what to think. He had given Mrs. Stringham during her call on himno such answer as would have armed her faith, and the ultimatum she haddescribed as ready for him when _he_ should be ready was therefore--ifon no other ground than her want of this power to answer for him--notto be presented. The presentation, heaven knew, was not what he desired.

  That was not, either, we hasten to declare--as Densher then soon enoughsaw--the idea with which Sir Luke finally stood before him again. Forstand before him again he finally did; just when our friend hadgloomily embraced the belief that the limit of his power to absenthimself from London obligations would have been reached. Four or fivedays, exclusive of journeys, represented the largest supposablesacrifice--to a head not crowned--on the part of one of the highestmedical lights in the world; so that really when the personage inquestion, following up a tinkle of the bell, solidly rose in thedoorway, it was to impose on Densher a vision that for the instant cutlike a knife. It spoke, the fact, and in a single dreadful word, of themagnitude--he shrank from calling it anything else--of Milly's case.The great man had not gone then, and an immense surrender to herimmense need was so expressed in it that some effect, some help, somehope, were flagrantly part of the expression. It was for Densher, withhis reaction from disappointment, as if he were conscious of ten thingsat once--the foremost being that just conceivably, since Sir Luke _was_still there, she had been saved. Close upon its heels, however, andquite as sharply, came the sense that the crisis--plainly even now tobe prolonged for him--was to have none of that sound simplicity. Notonly had his visitor not dropped in to gossip about Milly, he hadn'tdropped in to mention her at all; he had dropped in fairly to show thatduring the brief remainder of his stay, the end of which was now insight, as little as possible of that was to be looked for. Thedemonstration, such as it was, was in the key of their previousacquaintance, and it was their previous acquaintance that had made himcome. He was not to stop longer than the Saturday next at hand, butthere were things of interest he should like to see again meanwhile. Itwas for these things of interest, for Venice and the opportunity ofVenice, for a prowl or two, as he called it, and a turn about, that hehad looked his young man up--producing on the latter's part, as soon asthe case had, with the lapse of a further twenty-four hours, so defineditself, the most incongruous, yet most beneficent revulsion. Nothingcould in fact have been more monstrous on the surface--and Densher waswell aware of it--than the relief he found during this short period inthe tacit drop of all reference to the palace, in neither hearing newsnor asking for it. That was what had come out for him, on his visitor'sentrance, even in the very seconds of suspense that were connecting thefact also directly and intensely with Milly's state. He had come to sayhe had saved her--he had come, as from Mrs. Stringham, to say how shemight _be_ saved--he had come, in spite of Mrs. Stringham, to say shewas lost: the distinct throbs of hope, of fear, simultaneous for alltheir distinctness, merged their identity in a bound of the heart justas immediate and which remained after they had passed. It simply didwonders for him--this was the truth--that Sir Luke was, as he wouldhave said, quiet.

  The result of it was the oddest consciousness as of a blest calm aftera storm. He had been trying for weeks, as we know, to keepsuperlatively still, and trying it largely in solitude and silence; buthe looked back on it now as on the heat of fever. The real, the rightstillness was this particular form of society. They walked together andthey talked, looked up pictures again and recovered impressions--SirLuke knew just what he wanted; haunted a little the dealers in oldwares; sat down at Florian's for rest and mild drinks; blessed aboveall the grand weather, a bath of warm air, a pageant of autumn light.Once or twice while they rested the great man closed his eyes--keepingthem so for some minutes while his companion, the more easily watchinghis face for it, made private reflexions on the subject of lost sleep.He had been up at night with her--he in person, for hours; but this wasall he showed of it and was apparently to remain his nearest approachto an allusion. The extraordinary thing was that Densher could take itin perfectly as evidence, could turn cold at the image looking out ofit; and yet that he could at the same time not intermit a throb of hisresponse to accepted liberation. The liberation was an experience thatheld its own, and he cont
inued to know why, in spite of his deserts, inspite of his folly, in spite of everything, he had so fondly hoped forit. He had hoped for it, had sat in his room there waiting for it,because he had thus divined in it, should it come, some power to lethim off. He was _being_ let off; dealt with in the only way that didn'taggravate his responsibility. The beauty was also that this wasn't onsystem or on any basis of intimate knowledge; it was just by being aman of the world and by knowing life, by feeling the real, that SirLuke did him good. There had been in all the case too many women. Aman's sense of it, another man's, changed the air; and he wondered whatman, had he chosen, would have been more to his purpose than this one.He was large and easy--that was the benediction; he knew what matteredand what didn't; he distinguished between the essence and the shell,the just grounds and the unjust for fussing. One was thus--if one wereconcerned with him or exposed to him at all--in his hands for whateverhe should do, and not much less affected by his mercy than one mighthave been by his rigour. The grand thing--it did come to that--was theway he carried off, as one might fairly call it, the business of makingodd things natural. Nothing, if they hadn't taken it so, could haveexceeded the unexplained oddity, between them, of Densher's nowcomplete detachment from the poor ladies at the palace; nothing couldhave exceeded the no less marked anomaly of the great man's ownabstentions of speech. He made, as he had done when they met at thestation, nothing whatever of anything; and the effect of it, Densherwould have said, was a relation with him quite resembling that ofdoctor and patient. One took the cue from him as one might have taken adose--except that the cue was pleasant in the taking.

  That was why one could leave it to his tacit discretion, why for thethree or four days Densher again and again did so leave it; merelywondering a little, at the most, on the eve of Saturday, the announcedterm of the episode. Waiting once more on this latter occasion, theSaturday morning, for Sir Luke's reappearance at the station, ourfriend had to recognise the drop of his own borrowed ease, the result,naturally enough, of the prospect of losing a support. The difficultywas that, on such lines as had served them, the support was Sir Luke'spersonal presence. Would he go without leaving some substitute forthat?--and without breaking, either, his silence in respect to hiserrand? Densher was in still deeper ignorance than at the hour of hiscall, and what was truly prodigious at so supreme a moment was that--ashad immediately to appear--no gleam of light on what he had been livingwith for a week found its way out of him. What he had been doing wasproof of a huge interest as well as of a huge fee; yet when theLeporelli gondola again, and somewhat tardily, approached, hiscompanion, watching from the water-steps, studied his fine closed faceas much as ever in vain. It was like a lesson, from the highestauthority, on the subject of the relevant, so that its blanknessaffected Densher of a sudden almost as a cruelty, feeling it quiteawfully compatible, as he did, with Milly's having ceased to exist. Andthe suspense continued after they had passed together, as time wasshort, directly into the station, where Eugenio, in the field early,was mounting guard over the compartment he had secured. The strain,though probably lasting, at the carriage-door, but a couple of minutes,prolonged itself so for our poor gentleman's nerves that heinvoluntarily directed a long look at Eugenio, who met it, however, asonly Eugenio could. Sir Luke's attention was given for the time to theright bestowal of his numerous effects, about which he was particular,and Densher fairly found himself, so far as silence could go,questioning the representative of the palace. It didn't humiliate himnow; it didn't humiliate him even to feel that that personage exactlyknew how little he satisfied him. Eugenio resembled to that extent SirLuke--to the extent of the extraordinary things with which his facialhabit was compatible. By the time, however, that Densher had taken fromit all its possessor intended Sir Luke was free and with a hand out forfarewell. He offered the hand at first without speech; only on meetinghis eyes could our young man see that they had never yet so completelylooked at him. It was never, with Sir Luke, that they looked harder atone time than at another; but they looked longer, and this, even ashade of it, might mean on his part everything. It meant, Densher forten seconds believed, that Milly Theale was dead; so that the word atlast spoken made him start.

  "I shall come back."

  "Then she's better?"

  "I shall come back within the month," Sir Luke repeated without heedingthe question. He had dropped Densher's hand, but he held him otherwisestill. "I bring you a message from Miss Theale," he said as if theyhadn't spoken of her. "I'm commissioned to ask you from her to go andsee her."

  Densher's rebound from his supposition had a violence that his starebetrayed. "She asks me?"

  Sir Luke had got into the carriage, the door of which the guard hadclosed; but he spoke again as he stood at the window, bending a littlebut not leaning out. "She told me she'd like it, and I promised that,as I expected to find you here, I'd let you know."

  Densher, on the platform, took it from him, but what he took broughtthe blood into his face quite as what he had had to take from Mrs.Stringham. And he was also bewildered. "Then she can receive--?"

  "She can receive you."

  "And you're coming back--?"

  "Oh because I must. She's not to move. She's to stay. I come to her."

  "I see, I see," said Densher, who indeed did see--saw the sense of hisfriend's words and saw beyond it as well. What Mrs. Stringham hadannounced, and what he had yet expected not to have to face, _had_ thencome. Sir Luke had kept it for the last, but there it was, and thecolourless compact form it was now taking--the tone of one man of theworld to another, who, after what had happened, would understand--wasbut the characteristic manner of his appeal. Densher was to understandremarkably much; and the great thing certainly was to show that he did."I'm particularly obliged, I'll go to-day." He brought that out, but inhis pause, while they continued to look at each other, the train hadslowly creaked into motion. There was time but for one more word, andthe young man chose it, out of twenty, with intense concentration."Then she's better?"

  Sir Luke's face was wonderful. "Yes, she's better." And he kept it atthe window while the train receded, holding him with it still. It wasto be his nearest approach to the utter reference they had hitherto sosuccessfully avoided. If it stood for everything; never had a face hadto stand for more. So Densher, held after the train had gone, sharplyreflected; so he reflected, asking himself into what abyss it pushedhim, even while conscious of retreating under the maintainedobservation of Eugenio.

  BOOK TENTH

  I

  "Then it has been--what do you say? a whole fortnight?--without yourmaking a sign?"

  Kate put that to him distinctly, in the December dusk of Lancaster Gateand on the matter of the time he had been back; but he saw with itstraightway that she was as admirably true as ever to herinstinct--which was a system as well--of not admitting the possibilitybetween them of small resentments, of trifles to trip up their generaltrust. That by itself, the renewed beauty of it, would at this freshsight of her have stirred him to his depths if something else,something no less vivid but quite separate, hadn't stirred him stillmore. It was in seeing her that he felt what their interruption hadbeen, and that they met across it even as persons whose adventures, oneither side, in time and space, of the nature of perils and exiles, hadhad a peculiar strangeness. He wondered if he were as different for heras she herself had immediately appeared: which was but his way indeedof taking in, with his thrill, that--even going by the mere firstlook--she had never been so handsome. That fact bloomed for him, in thefirelight and lamplight that glowed their welcome through the Londonfog, as the flower of her difference; just as her differenceitself--part of which was her striking him as older in a degree forwhich no mere couple of months could account--was the fruit of theirintimate relation. If she was different it was because they had chosentogether that she should be, and she might now, as a proof of theirwisdom, their success, of the reality of what had happened--of what infact, for the spirit of each, was still happening--been showing it tohim for pride.
His having returned and yet kept, for numbered days, sostill, had been, he was quite aware, the first point he should have totackle; with which consciousness indeed he had made a clean breast ofit in finally addressing Mrs. Lowder a note that had led to his presentvisit. He had written to Aunt Maud as the finer way; and it woulddoubtless have been to be noted that he needed no effort not to writeto Kate. Venice was three weeks behind him--he had come up slowly; butit was still as if even in London he must conform to her law. That wasexactly how he was able, with his faith in her steadiness, to appeal toher feeling for the situation and explain his stretched delicacy. Hehad come to tell her everything, so far as occasion would serve them;and if nothing was more distinct than that his slow journey, his waits,his delay to reopen communication had kept pace with this resolve, sothe inconsequence was doubtless at bottom but one of the elements ofintensity. He was gathering everything up, everything he should tellher. That took time, and the proof was that, as he felt on the spot, hecouldn't have brought it all with him before this afternoon. He _had_brought it, to the last syllable, and, out of the quantity it wouldn'tbe hard--as he in fact found--to produce, for Kate's understanding, hisfirst reason.

  "A fortnight, yes--it was a fortnight Friday; but I've only beenkeeping in, you see, with our wonderful system." He was so easilyjustified as that this of itself plainly enough prevented her sayingshe didn't see. Their wonderful system was accordingly still vivid forher; and such a gage of its equal vividness for himself was preciselywhat she must have asked. He hadn't even to dot his i's beyond theremark that on the very face of it, she would remember, their wonderfulsystem attached no premium to rapidities of transition. "I couldn'tquite--don't you know?--take my rebound with a rush; and I suppose I'vebeen instinctively hanging off to minimise, for you as well as formyself, the appearances of rushing. There's a sort of fitness. But Iknew you'd understand." It was presently as if she really understood sowell that she almost appealed from his insistence--yet looking at himtoo, he was not unconscious, as if this mastery of fitnesses was astrong sign for her of what she had done to him. He might have struckher as expert for contingencies in the very degree of her having inVenice struck _him_ as expert. He smiled over his plea for a renewalwith stages and steps, a thing shaded, as they might say, andgraduated; though--finely as she must respond--she met the smile but asshe had met his entrance five minutes before. Her soft gravity at thatmoment--which was yet not solemnity, but the look of a consciousnesscharged with life to the brim and wishing not to overflow--had notqualified her welcome; what had done this being much more the presencein the room, for a couple of minutes, of the footman who had introducedhim and who had been interrupted in preparing the tea-table.

  Mrs. Lowder's reply to Densher's note had been to appoint the tea-hour,five o'clock on Sunday, for his seeing them. Kate had thereafter wiredhim, without a signature, "Come on Sunday _before_ tea--about a quarterof an hour, which will help us"; and he had arrived thereforescrupulously at twenty minutes to five. Kate was alone in the room andhadn't delayed to tell him that Aunt Maud, as she had happily gathered,was to be, for the interval--not long but precious--engaged with an oldservant, retired and pensioned, who had been paying her a visit and whowas within the hour to depart again for the suburbs. They were to havethe scrap of time, after the withdrawal of the footman, to themselves,and there was a moment when, in spite of their wonderful system, inspite of the proscription of rushes and the propriety of shades, itproclaimed itself indeed precious. And all without prejudice--that waswhat kept it noble--to Kate's high sobriety and her beautifulself-command. If he had his discretion she had her perfect manner,which was _her_ decorum. Mrs. Stringham, he had, to finish with thequestion of his delay, furthermore observed, Mrs. Stringham would havewritten to Mrs. Lowder of his having quitted the place; so that itwasn't as if he were hoping to cheat them. They'd know he was no longerthere.

  "Yes, we've known it."

  "And you continue to hear?"

  "From Mrs. Stringham? Certainly. By which I mean Aunt Maud does."

  "Then you've recent news?"

  Her face showed a wonder. "Up to within a day or two I believe. Buthaven't _you?_"

  "No--I've heard nothing." And it was now that he felt how much he hadto tell her. "I don't get letters. But I've been sure Mrs. Lowderdoes." With which he added: "Then of course you know." He waited as ifshe would show what she knew; but she only showed in silence the dawnof a surprise that she couldn't control. There was nothing but for himto ask what he wanted. "Is Miss Theale alive?"

  Kate's look at this was large. "Don't you _know?_"

  "How should I, my dear--in the absence of everything?" And he himselfstared as for light. "She's dead?" Then as with her eyes on him sheslowly shook her head he uttered a strange "Not yet?"

  It came out in Kate's face that there were several questions on herlips, but the one she presently put was: "Is it very terrible?"

  "The manner of her so consciously and helplessly dying?" He had tothink a moment. "Well, yes--since you ask me: very terrible to _me_--sofar as, before I came away, I had any sight of it. But I don't think,"he went on, "that--though I'll try--I _can_ quite tell you what it was,what it is, for me. That's why I probably just sounded to you," heexplained, "as if I hoped it might be over."

  She gave him her quietest attention, but he by this time saw that, sofar as telling her all was concerned, she would be divided between thewish and the reluctance to hear it; between the curiosity that, notunnaturally, would consume her and the opposing scruple of a respectfor misfortune. The more she studied him too--and he had never so felther closely attached to his face--the more the choice of an attitudewould become impossible to her. There would simply be a feelinguppermost, and the feeling wouldn't be eagerness. This perception grewin him fast, and he even, with his imagination, had for a moment thequick forecast of her possibly breaking out at him, should he go toofar, with a wonderful: "What horrors are you telling me?" It would havethe sound--wouldn't it be open to him fairly to bring that outhimself?--of a repudiation, for pity and almost for shame, ofeverything that in Venice had passed between them. Not that she wouldconfess to any return upon herself; not that she would let compunctionor horror give her away; but it was in the air for him--yes--that shewouldn't want details, that she positively wouldn't take them, andthat, if he would generously understand it from her, she would preferto keep him down. Nothing, however, was more definite for him than thatat the same time he must remain down but so far as it suited him.Something rose strong within him against his not being free with her.She had been free enough about it all, three months before, with _him_.That was what she was at present only in the sense of treating himhandsomely. "I can believe," she said with perfect consideration, "howdreadful for you much of it must have been."

  He didn't however take this up; there were things about which he wishedfirst to be clear. "There's no other possibility, by what you now know?I mean for her life." And he had just to insist--she would say aslittle as she could. "She _is_ dying?"

  "She's dying."

  It was strange to him, in the matter of Milly, that Lancaster Gatecould make him any surer; yet what in the world, in the matter ofMilly, wasn't strange? Nothing was so much so as his own behaviour--hispresent as well as his past. He could but do as he must. "Has Sir LukeStrett," he asked, "gone back to her?"

  "I believe he's there now."

  "Then," said Densher, "it's the end."

  She took it in silence for whatever he deemed it to be; but she spokeotherwise after a minute. "You won't know, unless you've perhaps seenhim yourself, that Aunt Maud has been to him."

  "Oh!" Densher exclaimed, with nothing to add to it.

  "For real news," Kate herself after an instant added.

  "She hasn't thought Mrs. Stringham's real?"

  "It's perhaps only I who haven't. It was on Aunt Maud's trying againthree days ago to see him that she heard at his house of his havinggone. He had started I believe some days before."

  "And won't the
n by this time be back?"

  Kate shook her head. "She sent yesterday to know."

  "He won't leave her then"--Densher had turned it over--"while shelives. He'll stay to the end. He's magnificent."

  "I think _she_ is," said Kate.

  It had made them again look at each other long; and what it drew fromhim rather oddly was: "Oh you don't know!"

  "Well, she's after all my friend."

  It was somehow, with her handsome demur, the answer he had leastexpected of her; and it fanned with its breath, for a brief instant,his old sense of her variety. "I see. You would have been sure of it.You _were_ sure of it."

  "Of course I was sure of it."

  And a pause again, with this, fell upon them; which Densher, however,presently broke. "If you don't think Mrs. Stringham's news 'real' whatdo you think of Lord Mark's?"

  She didn't think anything. "Lord Mark's?"

  "You haven't seen him?"

  "Not since he saw her."

  "You've known then of his seeing her?"

  "Certainly. From Mrs. Stringham."

  "And have you known," Densher went on, "the rest?"

  Kate wondered. "What rest?"

  "Why everything. It was his visit that she couldn't stand--it was whatthen took place that simply killed her."

  "Oh!" Kate seriously breathed. But she had turned pale, and he sawthat, whatever her degree of ignorance of these connexions, it wasn'tput on. "Mrs. Stringham hasn't said _that_."

  He observed none the less that she didn't ask what had then takenplace; and he went on with his contribution to her knowledge. "The wayit affected her was that it made her give up. She has given up beyondall power to care again, and that's why she's dying."

  "Oh!" Kate once more slowly sighed, but with a vagueness that made himpursue.

  "One can see now that she was living by will--which was very much whatyou originally told me of her."

  "I remember. That was it."

  "Well then her will, at a given moment, broke down, and the collapsewas determined by that fellow's dastardly stroke. He told her, thescoundrel, that you and I are secretly engaged."

  Kate gave a quick glare. "But he doesn't know it!"

  "That doesn't matter. _She_ did by the time he had left her. Besides,"Densher added, "he does know it. When," he continued, "did you last seehim?"

  But she was lost now in the picture before her. "_That_ was what madeher worse?"

  He watched her take it in--it so added to her sombre beauty. Then hespoke as Mrs. Stringham had spoken. "She turned her face to the wall."

  "Poor Milly!" said Kate.

  Slight as it was, her beauty somehow gave it style; so that hecontinued consistently: "She learned it, you see, too soon--since ofcourse one's idea had been that she might never even learn it at all.And she _had_ felt sure--through everything we had done--of there notbeing between us, so far at least as you were concerned, anything sheneed regard as a warning."

  She took another moment for thought. "It wasn't through anything _you_did--whatever that may have been--that she gained her certainty. It wasby the conviction she got from me."

  "Oh it's very handsome," Densher said, "for you to take your share!"

  "Do you suppose," Kate asked, "that I think of denying it?"

  Her look and her tone made him for the instant regret his comment,which indeed had been the first that rose to his lips as an effectabsolutely of what they would have called between them herstraightness. Her straightness, visibly, was all his own loyalty couldask. Still, that was comparatively beside the mark. "Of course I don'tsuppose anything but that we're together in our recognitions, ourresponsibilities--whatever we choose to call them. It isn't a questionfor us of apportioning shares or distinguishing invidiously among suchimpressions as it was our idea to give."

  "It wasn't _your_ idea to give impressions," said Kate.

  He met this with a smile that he himself felt, in its strainedcharacter, as queer. "Don't go into that!"

  It was perhaps not as going into it that she had another idea--an ideaborn, she showed, of the vision he had just evoked. "Wouldn't it havebeen possible then to deny the truth of the information? I mean of LordMark's."

  Densher wondered. "Possible for whom?"

  "Why for you."

  "To tell her he lied?"

  "To tell her he's mistaken."

  Densher stared--he was stupefied; the "possible" thus glanced at byKate being exactly the alternative he had had to face in Venice and toput utterly away from him. Nothing was stranger than such a differencein their view of it. "And to lie myself, you mean, to do it? We _are_,my dear child," he said, "I suppose, still engaged."

  "Of course we're still engaged. But to save her life--!"

  He took in for a little the way she talked of it. Of course, it was tobe remembered, she had always simplified, and it brought back his senseof the degree in which, to her energy as compared with his own, manythings were easy; the very sense that so often before had moved him toadmiration. "Well, if you must know--and I want you to be clear aboutit--I didn't even seriously think of a denial to her face. The questionof it--_as_ possibly saving her--was put to me definitely enough; butto turn it over was only to dismiss it. Besides," he added, "itwouldn't have done any good."

  "You mean she would have had no faith in your correction?" She hadspoken with a promptitude that affected him of a sudden as almost glib;but he himself paused with the overweight of all he meant, and shemeanwhile went on. "Did you try?"

  "I hadn't even a chance."

  Kate maintained her wonderful manner, the manner of at once having itall before her and yet keeping it all at its distance. "She wouldn'tsee you?"

  "Not after your friend had been with her."

  She hesitated. "Couldn't you write?"

  It made him also think, but with a difference. "She had turned her faceto the wall."

  This again for a moment hushed her, and they were both too grave nowfor parenthetic pity. But her interest came out for at least theminimum of light. "She refused even to let you speak to her?"

  "My dear girl," Densher returned, "she was miserably, prohibitivelyill."

  "Well, that was what she had been before."

  "And it didn't prevent? No," Densher admitted, "it didn't; and I don'tpretend that she's not magnificent."

  "She's prodigious," said Kate Croy.

  He looked at her a moment. "So are you, my dear. But that's how it is,"he wound up; "and there we are."

  His idea had been in advance that she would perhaps sound him much moredeeply, asking him above all two or three specific things. He hadfairly fancied her even wanting to know and trying to find out how far,as the odious phrase was, he and Milly had gone, and how near, by thesame token, they had come. He had asked himself if he were prepared tohear her do that, and had had to take for answer that he was preparedof course for everything. Wasn't he prepared for her ascertaining ifher two or three prophecies had found time to be made true? He hadfairly believed himself ready to say whether or no the overture onMilly's part promised according to the boldest of them had taken place.But what was in fact blessedly coming to him was that so far as suchthings were concerned his readiness wouldn't be taxed. Kate's pressureon the question of what had taken place remained so admirably generalthat even her present enquiry kept itself free of sharpness. "So thenthat after Lord Mark's interference you never again met?"

  It was what he had been all the while coming to. "No; we met once--sofar as it could be called a meeting. I had stayed--I didn't come away."

  "That," said Kate, "was no more than decent."

  "Precisely"--he felt himself wonderful; "and I wanted to be no less.She sent for me, I went to her, and that night I left Venice."

  His companion waited. "Wouldn't _that_ then have been your chance?"

  "To refute Lord Mark's story? No, not even if before her there I hadwanted to. What did it signify either? She was dying."

  "Well," Kate in a manner persisted, "why not just _because_ she
wasdying?" She had however all her discretion. "But of course I know thatseeing her you could judge."

  "Of course seeing her I could judge. And I did see her! If I had deniedyou moreover," Densher said with his eyes on her, "I'd have stuck toit."

  She took for a moment the intention of his face. "You mean that toconvince her you'd have insisted or somehow proved--?"

  "I mean that to convince _you_ I'd have insisted or somehow proved--!"

  Kate looked for her moment at a loss. "To convince 'me'?"

  "I wouldn't have made my denial, in such conditions, only to take itback afterwards."

  With this quickly light came for her, and with it also her colourflamed. "Oh you'd have broken with me to make your denial a truth?You'd have 'chucked' me"--she embraced it perfectly--"to save yourconscience?"

  "I couldn't have done anything else," said Merton Densher. "So you seehow right I was not to commit myself, and how little I could dream ofit. If it ever again appears to you that I _might_ have done so,remember what I say."

  Kate again considered, but not with the effect at once to which hepointed. "You've fallen in love with her."

  "Well then say so--with a dying woman. Why need you mind and what doesit matter?"

  It came from him, the question, straight out of the intensity ofrelation and the face-to-face necessity into which, from the first,from his entering the room, they had found themselves thrown; but itgave them their most extraordinary moment. "Wait till she is dead! Mrs.Stringham," Kate added, "is to telegraph." After which, in a tone stilldifferent, "For what then," she asked, "did Milly send for you?"

  "It was what I tried to make out before I went. I must tell youmoreover that I had no doubt of its really being to give me, as yousay, a chance. She believed, I suppose, that I _might_ deny; and what,to my own mind, was before me in going to her was the certainty thatshe'd put me to my test. She wanted from my own lips--so I saw it--thetruth. But I was with her for twenty minutes, and she never asked mefor it."

  "She never wanted the truth"--Kate had a high headshake. "She wanted_you_. She would have taken from you what you could give her and beenglad of it, even if she had known it false. You might have lied to herfrom pity, and she have seen you and felt you lie, and yet--since itwas all for tenderness--she would have thanked you and blessed you andclung to you but the more. For that was your strength, my dearman--that she loves you with passion."

  "Oh my 'strength'!" Densher coldly murmured.

  "Otherwise, since she had sent for you, what was it to ask of you?" Andthen--quite without irony--as he waited a moment to say: "Was it justonce more to look at you?"

  "She had nothing to ask of me--nothing, that is, but not to stay anylonger. She did to that extent want to see me. She had supposed atfirst--after he had been with her--that I had seen the propriety oftaking myself off. Then since I hadn't--seeing my propriety as I did inanother way--she found, days later, that I was still there. This," saidDensher, "affected her."

  "Of course it affected her."

  Again she struck him, for all her dignity, as glib. "If it was somehowfor _her_ I was still staying, she wished that to end, she wished me toknow how little there was need of it. And as a manner of farewell shewished herself to tell me so."

  "And she did tell you so?"

  "Face-to-face, yes. Personally, as she desired."

  "And as _you_ of course did."

  "No, Kate," he returned with all their mutual consideration; "not as Idid. I hadn't desired it in the least."

  "You only went to oblige her?"

  "To oblige her. And of course also to oblige you."

  "Oh for myself certainly I'm glad."

  "'Glad'?"--he echoed vaguely the way it rang out.

  "I mean you did quite the right thing. You did it especially in havingstayed. But that was all?" Kate went on. "That you mustn't wait?"

  "That was really all--and in perfect kindness."

  "Ah kindness naturally: from the moment she asked of you such a--well,such an effort. That you mustn't wait--that was the point," Kateadded--"to see her die."

  "That was the point, my dear," Densher said.

  "And it took twenty minutes to make it?"

  He thought a little. "I didn't time it to a second. I paid her thevisit--just like another."

  "Like another person?"

  "Like another visit."

  "Oh!" said Kate. Which had apparently the effect of slightly arrestinghis speech--an arrest she took advantage of to continue; making with itindeed her nearest approach to an enquiry of the kind against which hehad braced himself. "Did she receive you--in her condition--in herroom?"

  "Not she," said Merton Densher. "She received me just as usual: in thatglorious great _salone_, in the dress she always wears, from herinveterate corner of her sofa." And his face for the moment conveyedthe scene, just as hers equally embraced it. "Do you remember what youoriginally said to me of her?"

  "Ah I've said so many things."

  "That she wouldn't smell of drugs, that she wouldn't taste of medicine.Well, she didn't."

  "So that it was really almost happy?"

  It took him a long time to answer, occupied as he partly was in feelinghow nobody but Kate could have invested such a question with the tonethat was perfectly right. She meanwhile, however, patiently waited. "Idon't think I can attempt to say now what it was. Some day--perhaps.For it would be worth it for us."

  "Some day--certainly." She seemed to record the promise. Yet she spokeagain abruptly. "She'll recover."

  "Well," said Densher, "you'll see."

  She had the air an instant of trying to. "Did she show anything of herfeeling? I mean," Kate explained, "of her feeling of having beenmisled."

  She didn't press hard, surely; but he had just mentioned that he wouldhave rather to glide. "She showed nothing but her beauty and herstrength."

  "Then," his companion asked, "what's the use of her strength?"

  He seemed to look about for a use he could name; but he had soon givenit up. "She must die, my dear, in her own extraordinary way."

  "Naturally. But I don't see then what proof you have that she was everalienated."

  "I have the proof that she refused for days and days to see me."

  "But she was ill."

  "That hadn't prevented her--as you yourself a moment ago said--duringthe previous time. If it had been only illness it would have made nodifference with her."

  "She would still have received you?"

  "She would still have received me."

  "Oh well," said Kate, "if you know--!"

  "Of course I know. I know moreover as well from Mrs. Stringham."

  "And what does Mrs. Stringham know?"

  "Everything."

  She looked at him longer. "Everything?"

  "Everything."

  "Because you've told her?"

  "Because she has seen for herself. I've told her nothing. She's aperson who does see."

  Kate thought. "That's by her liking you too. She as well is prodigious.You see what interest in a man does. It does it all round. So youneedn't be afraid."

  "I'm not afraid," said Densher.

  Kate moved from her place then, looking at the clock, which markedfive. She gave her attention to the tea-table, where Aunt Maud's hugesilver kettle, which had been exposed to its lamp and which she had notsoon enough noticed, was hissing too hard. "Well, it's all mostwonderful!" she exclaimed as she rather too profusely--a sign herfriend noticed--ladled tea into the pot. He watched her a moment atthis occupation, coming nearer the table while she put in the steamingwater. "You'll have some?"

  He hesitated. "Hadn't we better wait--?"

  "For Aunt Maud?" She saw what he meant--the deprecation, by their oldlaw, of betrayals of the intimate note. "Oh you needn't mind now. We'vedone it!"

  "Humbugged her?"

  "Squared her. You've pleased her."

  Densher mechanically accepted his tea. He was thinking of somethingelse, and his thought in a moment came out. "What a
brute then I mustbe!"

  "A brute--?"

  "To have pleased so many people."

  "Ah," said Kate with a gleam of gaiety, "you've done it to please_me_." But she was already, with her gleam, reverting a little. "What Idon't understand is--won't you have any sugar?"

  "Yes, please."

  "What I don't understand," she went on when she had helped him, "iswhat it was that had occurred to bring her round again. If she gave youup for days and days, what brought her back to you?"

  She asked the question with her own cup in her hand, but it found himready enough in spite of his sense of the ironic oddity of their goinginto it over the tea-table. "It was Sir Luke Strett who brought herback. His visit, his presence there did it."

  "He brought her back then to life."

  "Well, to what I saw."

  "And by interceding for you?"

  "I don't think he interceded. I don't indeed know what he did."

  Kate wondered. "Didn't he tell you?"

  "I didn't ask him. I met him again, but we practically didn't speak ofher."

  Kate stared. "Then how do you know?"

  "I see. I feel. I was with him again as I had been before--"

  "Oh and you pleased him too? That was it?"

  "He understood," said Densher.

  "But understood what?"

  He waited a moment. "That I had meant awfully well."

  "Ah, and made _her_ understand? I see," she went on as he said nothing."But how did he convince her?"

  Densher put down his cup and turned away. "You must ask Sir Luke."

  He stood looking at the fire and there was a time without sound. "Thegreat thing," Kate then resumed, "is that she's satisfied. Which," shecontinued, looking across at him, "is what I've worked for."

  "Satisfied to die in the flower of her youth?"

  "Well, at peace with you."

  "Oh 'peace'!" he murmured with his eyes on the fire.

  "The peace of having loved."

  He raised his eyes to her. "Is _that_ peace?"

  "Of having _been_ loved," she went on. "That is. Of having," she woundup, "realised her passion. She wanted nothing more. She has had _all_she wanted."

  Lucid and always grave, she gave this out with a beautiful authoritythat he could for the time meet with no words. He could only again lookat her, though with the sense in so doing that he made her more than heintended take his silence for assent. Quite indeed as if she did sotake it she quitted the table and came to the fire. "You may think ithideous that I should now, that I should _yet_"--she made a point ofthe word--"pretend to draw conclusions. But we've not failed."

  "Oh!" he only again murmured.

  She was once more close to him, close as she had been the day she cameto him in Venice, the quickly returning memory of which intensified andenriched the fact. He could practically deny in such conditions nothingthat she said, and what she said was, with it, visibly, a fruit of thatknowledge. "We've succeeded." She spoke with her eyes deep in his own."She won't have loved you for nothing." It made him wince, but sheinsisted. "And you won't have loved _me_."

  II

  He was to remain for several days under the deep impression of thisinclusive passage, so luckily prolonged from moment to moment, butinterrupted at its climax, as may be said, by the entrance of AuntMaud, who found them standing together near the fire. The bearings ofthe colloquy, however, sharp as they were, were less sharp to hisintelligence, strangely enough, than those of a talk with Mrs. Lowderalone for which she soon gave him--or for which perhaps rather Kategave him--full occasion. What had happened on her at last joining themwas to conduce, he could immediately see, to her desiring to have himto herself. Kate and he, no doubt, at the opening of the door, hadfallen apart with a certain suddenness, so that she had turned her hardfine eyes from one to the other; but the effect of this lost itself, tohis mind, the next minute, in the effect of his companion's rarealertness. She instantly spoke to her aunt of what had first beenuppermost for herself, inviting her thereby intimately to join them,and doing it the more happily also, no doubt, because the fact sheresentfully named gave her ample support. "Had you quite understood, mydear, that it's full three weeks--?" And she effaced herself as if toleave Mrs. Lowder to deal from her own point of view with thisextravagance. Densher of course straightway noted that his cue for theprotection of Kate was to make, no less, all of it he could; and theirtracks, as he might have said, were fairly covered by the time theirhostess had taken afresh, on his renewed admission, the measure of hisscant eagerness. Kate had moved away as if no great showing were neededfor her personal situation to be seen as delicate. She had beenentertaining their visitor on her aunt's behalf--a visitor she had beenat one time suspected of favouring too much and who had now come backto them as the stricken suitor of another person. It wasn't that thefate of the other person, her exquisite friend, didn't, in its tragicturn, also concern herself: it was only that her acceptance of Mr.Densher as a source of information could scarcely help having anawkwardness. She invented the awkwardness under Densher's eyes, and hemarvelled on his side at the instant creation. It served her as thefine cloud that hangs about a goddess in an epic, and the young man wasbut vaguely to know at what point of the rest of his visit she had, forconsideration, melted into it and out of sight.

  He was taken up promptly with another matter--the truth of theremarkable difference, neither more nor less, that the events of Venicehad introduced into his relation with Aunt Maud and that these weeks oftheir separation had caused quite richly to ripen for him. She had notsat down to her tea-table before he felt himself on terms with her thatwere absolutely new, nor could she press on him a second cup withouther seeming herself, and quite wittingly, so to define and establishthem. She regretted, but she quite understood, that what was takingplace had obliged him to hang off; they had--after hearing of him frompoor Susan as gone--been hoping for an early sight of him; they wouldhave been interested, naturally, in his arriving straight from thescene. Yet she needed no reminder that the scene precisely--by whichshe meant the tragedy that had so detained and absorbed him, thememory, the shadow, the sorrow of it--was what marked him forunsociability. She thus presented him to himself, as it were, in theguise in which she had now adopted him, and it was the element of truthin the character that he found himself, for his own part, adopting. Shetreated him as blighted and ravaged, as frustrate and already bereft;and for him to feel that this opened for him a new chapter of franknesswith her he scarce had also to perceive how it smoothed his approachesto Kate. It made the latter accessible as she hadn't yet begun to be;it set up for him at Lancaster Gate an association positively hostileto any other legend. It was quickly vivid to him that, were he minded,he could "work" this association: he had but to use the house freelyfor his prescribed attitude and he need hardly ever be out of it.Stranger than anything moreover was to be the way that by the end of aweek he stood convicted to his own sense of a surrender to Mrs.Lowder's view. He had somehow met it at a point that had brought himon--brought him on a distance that he couldn't again retrace. He hadprivate hours of wondering what had become of his sincerity; he hadothers of simply reflecting that he had it all in use. His only want ofcandour was Aunt Maud's wealth of sentiment. She was hugelysentimental, and the worst he did was to take it from her. He wasn't sohimself--everything was too real; but it was none the less not falsethat he _had_ been through a mill.

  It was in particular not false for instance that when she had said tohim, on the Sunday, almost cosily, from her sofa behind the tea, "Iwant you not to doubt, you poor dear, that I'm _with_ you to the end!"his meeting her halfway had been the only course open to him. She waswith him to the end--or she might be--in a way Kate wasn't; and even ifit literally made her society meanwhile more soothing he must justbrush away the question of why it shouldn't. Was he professing to herin any degree the possession of an aftersense that wasn't real? How inthe world _could_ he, when his aftersense, day by day, was his greatestreality? Such only was at bottom what t
here was between them, and twoor three times over it made the hour pass. These were occasions--twoand a scrap--on which he had come and gone without mention of Kate. Nowthat almost as never yet he had licence to ask for her, the queer turnof their affair made it a false note. It was another queer turn thatwhen he talked with Aunt Maud about Milly nothing else seemed to comeup. He called upon her almost avowedly for that purpose, and it was thequeerest turn of all that the state of his nerves should require it. Heliked her better; he was really behaving, he had occasion to say tohimself, as if he liked her best. The thing was absolutely that she met_him_ halfway. Nothing could have been broader than her vision, thanher loquacity, than her sympathy. It appeared to gratify, to satisfyher to see him as he was; that too had its effect. It was all of coursethe last thing that could have seemed on the cards, a change by whichhe was completely _free_ with this lady; and it wouldn't indeed havecome about if--for another monstrosity--he hadn't ceased to be freewith Kate. Thus it was that on the third time in especial of beingalone with her he found himself uttering to the elder woman what hadbeen impossible of utterance to the younger. Mrs. Lowder gave him infact, on the ground of what he must keep from her, but one uneasymoment. That was when, on the first Sunday, after Kate had suppressedherself, she referred to her regret that he mightn't have stayed to theend. He found his reason difficult to give her, but she came after allto his help.

  "You simply couldn't stand it?"

  "I simply couldn't stand it. Besides you see--!" But he paused.

  "Besides what?" He had been going to say more--then he saw dangers;luckily however she had again assisted him. "Besides--oh I know!--menhaven't, in many relations, the courage of women."

  "They haven't the courage of women."

  "Kate or I would have stayed," she declared--"if we hadn't come awayfor the special reason that you so frankly appreciated."

  Densher had said nothing about his appreciation: hadn't his behavioursince the hour itself sufficiently shown it? But he presently said--hecouldn't help going so far: "I don't doubt, certainly, that Miss Croywould have stayed." And he saw again into the bargain what a marvel wasSusan Shepherd. She did nothing but protect him--she had done nothingbut keep it up. In copious communication with the friend of her youthshe had yet, it was plain, favoured this lady with nothing thatcompromised him. Milly's act of renouncement she had described but as achange for the worse; she had mentioned Lord Mark's descent, as evenwithout her it might be known, so that she mustn't appear to concealit; but she had suppressed explanations and connexions, and indeed, forall he knew, blessed Puritan soul, had invented commendable fictions.Thus it was absolutely that he was at his ease. Thus it was that,shaking for ever, in the unrest that didn't drop, his crossed leg, heleaned back in deep yellow satin chairs and took such comfort as came.She asked, it was true, Aunt Maud, questions that Kate hadn't; but thiswas just the difference, that from her he positively liked them. He hadtaken with himself on leaving Venice the resolution to regard Milly asalready dead to him--that being for his spirit the only thinkable wayto pass the time of waiting. He had left her because it was what suitedher, and it wasn't for him to go, as they said in America, behind this;which imposed on him but the sharper need to arrange himself with hisinterval. Suspense was the ugliest ache to him, and he would havenothing to do with it; the last thing he wished was to be unconsciousof her--what he wished to ignore was her own consciousness, tortured,for all he knew, crucified by its pain. Knowingly to hang about inLondon while the pain went on--what would that do but make his daysimpossible? His scheme was accordingly to convince himself--and by someart about which he was vague--that the sense of waiting had passed."What in fact," he restlessly reflected, "have I any further to do withit? Let me assume the thing actually over--as it at any moment maybe--and I become good again for something at least to somebody. I'mgood, as it is, for nothing to anybody, least of all to _her_." Heconsequently tried, so far as shutting his eyes and stalking grimlyabout was a trial; but his plan was carried out, it may well beguessed, neither with marked success nor with marked consistency. Thedays, whether lapsing or lingering, were a stiff reality; thesuppression of anxiety was a thin idea; the taste of life itself wasthe taste of suspense. That he _was_ waiting was in short at the bottomof everything; and it required no great sifting presently to feel thatif he took so much more, as he called it, to Mrs. Lowder this was justfor that reason.

  She helped him to hold out, all the while that she was subtleenough--and he could see her divine it as what he wanted--not to insiston the actuality of their tension. His nearest approach to success wasthus in being good for something to Aunt Maud, in default of any onebetter; her company eased his nerves even while they pretended togetherthat they had seen their tragedy out. They spoke of the dying girl inthe past tense; they said no worse of her than that she had _been_stupendous. On the other hand, however--and this was what wasn't forDensher pure peace--they insisted enough that stupendous was the word.It was the thing, this recognition, that kept him most quiet; he cameto it with her repeatedly; talking about it against time and, inparticular, we have noted, speaking of his supreme personal impressionas he hadn't spoken to Kate. It was almost as if she herself enjoyedthe perfection of the pathos; she sat there before the scene, as hecouldn't help giving it out to her, very much as a stout citizen's wifemight have sat, during a play that made people cry, in the pit or thefamily-circle. What most deeply stirred her was the way the poor girlmust have wanted to live.

  "Ah yes indeed--she did, she did: why in pity shouldn't she, witheverything to fill her world? The mere _money_ of her, the darling, ifit isn't too disgusting at such a time to mention that--!"

  Aunt Maud mentioned it--and Densher quite understood--but as fairlygiving poetry to the life Milly clung to: a view of the "might havebeen" before which the good lady was hushed anew to tears. She had hadher own vision of these possibilities, and her own social use for them,and since Milly's spirit had been after all so at one with her aboutthem, what was the cruelty of the event but a cruelty, of a sort, toherself? That came out when he named, as _the_ horrible thing to know,the fact of their young friend's unapproachable terror of the end, keepit down though she would; coming out therefore often, since in sonaming it he found the strangest of reliefs. He allowed it all itsvividness, as if on the principle of his not at least spirituallyshirking. Milly had held with passion to her dream of a future, and shewas separated from it, not shrieking indeed, but grimly, awfullysilent, as one might imagine some noble young victim of the scaffold,in the French Revolution, separated at the prison-door from some objectclutched for resistance. Densher, in a cold moment, so pictured thecase for Mrs. Lowder, but no moment cold enough had yet come to makehim so picture it to Kate. And it was the front so presented that hadbeen, in Milly, heroic; presented with the highest heroism, Aunt Maudby this time knew, on the occasion of his taking leave of her. He hadlet her know, absolutely for the girl's glory, how he had been receivedon that occasion: with a positive effect--since she was indeed soperfectly the princess that Mrs. Stringham always called her--ofprincely state.

  Before the fire in the great room that was all arabesques and cherubs,all gaiety and gilt, and that was warm at that hour too with a wealthof autumn sun, the state in question had been maintained and thesituation--well, Densher said for the convenience of exquisite Londongossip, sublime. The gossip--for it came to as much at LancasterGate--wasn't the less exquisite for his use of the silver veil, nor onthe other hand was the veil, so touched, too much drawn aside. Hehimself for that matter took in the scene again at moments as from thepage of a book. He saw a young man far off and in a relationinconceivable, saw him hushed, passive, staying his breath, but halfunderstanding, yet dimly conscious of something immense and holdinghimself painfully together not to lose it. The young man at thesemoments so seen was too distant and too strange for the right identity;and yet, outside, afterwards, it was his own face Densher had known. Hehad known then at the same time what the young man had been consciousof, and he
was to measure after that, day by day, how little he hadlost. At present there with Mrs. Lowder he knew he had gatheredall--that passed between them mutely as in the intervals of theirassociated gaze they exchanged looks of intelligence. This was as faras association could go, but it was far enough when she knew theessence. The essence was that something had happened to him toobeautiful and too sacred to describe. He had been, to his recoveredsense, forgiven, dedicated, blessed; but this he couldn't coherentlyexpress. It would have required an explanation--fatal to Mrs. Lowder'sfaith in him--of the nature of Milly's wrong. So, as to the wonderfulscene, they just stood at the door. They had the sense of the presencewithin--they felt the charged stillness; after which, their associationdeepened by it, they turned together away.

  That itself indeed, for our restless friend, became by the end of aweek the very principle of reaction: so that he woke up one morningwith such a sense of having played a part as he needed self-respect togainsay. He hadn't in the least stated at Lancaster Gate that, as ahaunted man--a man haunted with a memory--he was harmless; but thedegree to which Mrs. Lowder accepted, admired and explained his newaspect laid upon him practically the weight of a declaration. What hehadn't in the least stated her own manner was perpetually stating; itwas as haunted and harmless that she was constantly putting him down.There offered itself however to his purpose such an element as plainhonesty, and he had embraced, by the time he dressed, his propercorrective. They were on the edge of Christmas, but Christmas this yearwas, as in the London of so many other years, disconcertingly mild; thestill air was soft, the thick light was grey, the great town lookedempty, and in the Park, where the grass was green, where the sheepbrowsed, where the birds multitudinously twittered, the straight walkslent themselves to slowness and the dim vistas to privacy. He held itfast this morning till he had got out, his sacrifice to honour, andthen went with it to the nearest post-office and fixed it fast in atelegram; thinking of it moreover as a sacrifice only because he had,for reasons, felt it as an effort. Its character of effort it would oweto Kate's expected resistance, not less probable than on the occasionof past appeals; which was precisely why he--perhaps innocently--madehis telegram persuasive. It had, as a recall of tender hours, to be,for the young woman at the counter, a trifle cryptic; but there was agood deal of it in one way and another, representing as it did a richimpulse and costing him a couple of shillings. There was also a momentlater on, that day, when, in the Park, as he measured watchfully one oftheir old alleys, he might have been supposed by a cynical critic to bereckoning his chance of getting his money back. He was waiting--but hehad waited of old; Lancaster Gate as a danger was practically athand--but she had risked that danger before. Besides it was smallernow, with the queer turn of their affair; in spite of which indeed hewas graver as he lingered and looked out.

  Kate came at last by the way he had thought least likely, came as ifshe had started from the Marble Arch; but her advent was response--thatwas the great matter; response marked in her face and agreeable to him,even after Aunt Maud's responses, as nothing had been since his returnto London. She had not, it was true, answered his wire, and he hadbegun to fear, as she was late, that with the instinct of what he mightbe again intending to press upon her she had decided--though not withease--to deprive him of his chance. He would have of course, she knew,other chances, but she perhaps saw the present as offering her specialdanger. This, in fact, Densher could himself feel, was exactly why hehad so prepared it, and he had rejoiced, even while he waited, in allthat the conditions had to say to him of their simpler and better time.The shortest day of the year though it might be, it was, in the sameplace, by a whim of the weather, almost as much to their purpose as thedays of sunny afternoons when they had taken their first trysts. Thisand that tree, within sight, on the grass, stretched bare boughs overthe couple of chairs in which they had sat of old and in which--forthey really could sit down again--they might recover the clearness oftheir prime. It was to all intents however this very reference thatshowed itself in Kate's face as, with her swift motion, she came towardhim. It helped him, her swift motion, when it finally brought hernearer; helped him, for that matter, at first, if only by showing himafresh how terribly well she looked. It had been all along, hecertainly remembered, a phenomenon of no rarity that he had felt her,at particular moments, handsomer than ever before; one of these forinstance being still present to him as her entrance, under her aunt'seyes, at Lancaster Gate, the day of his dinner there after his returnfrom America; and another her aspect on the same spot two Sundaysago--the light in which she struck the eyes he had brought back fromVenice. In the course of a minute or two now he got, as he had got itthe other times, his apprehension of the special stamp of the fortuneof the moment.

  Whatever it had been determined by as the different hours recurred tohim, it took on at present a prompt connexion with an effect producedfor him in truth more than once during the past week, only now muchintensified. This effect he had already noted and named: it was that ofthe attitude assumed by his friend in the presence of the degree ofresponse on his part to Mrs. Lowder's welcome which she couldn'tpossibly have failed to notice. She _had_ noticed it, and she hadbeautifully shown him so; wearing in its honour the finest shade ofstudied serenity, a shade almost of gaiety over the workings of time.Everything of course was relative, with the shadow they were livingunder; but her condonation of the way in which he now, for confidence,distinguished Aunt Maud had almost the note of cheer. She had so by herown air consecrated the distinction, invidious in respect to herselfthough it might be; and nothing, really, more than this demonstration,could have given him had he still wanted it the measure of hersuperiority. It was doubtless for that matter this superiority alonethat on the winter noon gave smooth decision to her step and charmingcourage to her eyes--a courage that deepened in them when he hadpresently got to what he did want. He had delayed after she had joinedhim not much more than long enough for him to say to her, drawing herhand into his arm and turning off where they had turned of old, that hewouldn't pretend he hadn't lately had moments of not quite believing heshould ever again be so happy. She answered, passing over the reasons,whatever they had been, of his doubt, that her own belief was in highhappiness for them if they would only have patience; though nothing atthe same time could be dearer than his idea for their walk. It was onlymake-believe of course, with what had taken place for them, that theycouldn't meet at home; she spoke of their opportunities as suffering atno point. He had at any rate soon let her know that he wished thepresent one to suffer at none, and in a quiet spot, beneath a greatwintry tree, he let his entreaty come sharp.

  "We've played our dreadful game and we've lost. We owe it to ourselves,we owe it to our feeling _for_ ourselves and for each other, not towait another day. Our marriage will--fundamentally, somehow, don't yousee?--right everything that's wrong, and I can't express to you myimpatience. We've only to announce it--and it takes off the weight."

  "To 'announce' it?" Kate asked. She spoke as if not understanding,though she had listened to him without confusion.

  "To accomplish it then--to-morrow if you will; _do_ it and announce itas done. That's the least part of it--after it nothing will matter. Weshall be so right," he said, "that we shall be strong; we shall onlywonder at our past fear. It will seem an ugly madness. It will seem abad dream."

  She looked at him without flinching--with the look she had brought athis call; but he felt now the strange chill of her brightness. "My dearman, what has happened to you?"

  "Well, that I can bear it no longer. _That's_ simply what has happened.Something has snapped, has broken in me, and here I am. It's _as_ I amthat you must have me."

  He saw her try for a time to appear to consider it; but he saw her alsonot consider it. Yet he saw her, felt her, further--he heard her, withher clear voice--try to be intensely kind with him. "I don't see, youknow, what has changed." She had a large strange smile. "We've beengoing on together so well, and you suddenly desert me?"

  It made him helple
ssly gaze. "You call it so 'well'? You've touches,upon my soul--!"

  "I call it perfect--from my original point of view. I'm just where Iwas; and you must give me some better reason than you do, my dear, for_your_ not being. It seems to me," she continued, "that we're onlyright as to what has been between us so long as we do wait. I don'tthink we wish to have behaved like fools." He took in while she talkedher imperturbable consistency; which it was quietly, queerly hopelessto see her stand there and breathe into their mild remembering air. Hehad brought her there to be moved, and she was only immoveable--whichwas not moreover, either, because she didn't understand. She understoodeverything, and things he refused to; and she had reasons, deep down,the sense of which nearly sickened him. She had too again most of allher strange significant smile. "Of course if it's that you really_know_ something--?" It was quite conceivable and possible to her, hecould see, that he did. But he didn't even know what she meant, and heonly looked at her in gloom. His gloom however didn't upset her. "Youdo, I believe, only you've a delicacy about saying it. Your delicacy tome, my dear, is a scruple too much. I should have no delicacy inhearing it, so that if you can _tell_ me you know--"

  "Well?" he asked as she still kept what depended on it.

  "Why then I'll do what you want. We needn't, I grant you, in that casewait; and I can see what you mean by thinking it nicer of us not to. Idon't even ask you," she continued, "for a proof. I'm content with yourmoral certainty."

  By this time it had come over him--it had the force of a rush. Thepoint she made was clear, as clear as that the blood, while herecognised it, mantled in his face. "I know nothing whatever."

  "You've not an idea?"

  "I've not an idea."

  "I'd consent," she said--"I'd announce it to-morrow, to-day, I'd gohome this moment and announce it to Aunt Maud, for an idea: I mean anidea straight _from_ you, I mean as your own, given me in good faith.There, my dear!"--and she smiled again. "I call that really meetingyou."

  If it _was_ then what she called it, it disposed of his appeal, and hecould but stand there with his wasted passion--for it was in highpassion that he had from the morning acted--in his face. She made itall out, bent upon her--the idea he didn't have, and the idea he had,and his failure of insistence when it brought up _that_ challenge, andhis sense of her personal presence, and his horror, almost, of herlucidity. They made in him a mixture that might have been rage, butthat was turning quickly to mere cold thought, thought which led tosomething else and was like a new dim dawn. It affected her then, andshe had one of the impulses, in all sincerity, that had before this,between them, saved their position. When she had come nearer to him,when, putting her hand upon him, she made him sink with her, as sheleaned to him, into their old pair of chairs, she preventedirresistibly, she forestalled, the waste of his passion. She had anadvantage with his passion now.

  III

  He had said to her in the Park when challenged on it that nothing had"happened" to him as a cause for the demand he there made ofher--happened he meant since the account he had given, after hisreturn, of his recent experience. But in the course of a few days--theyhad brought him to Christmas morning--he was conscious enough, inpreparing again to seek her out, of a difference on that score.Something had in this case happened to him, and, after his taking thenight to think of it he felt that what it most, if not absolutelyfirst, involved was his immediately again putting himself in relationwith her. The fact itself had met him there--in his own smallquarters--on Christmas Eve, and had not then indeed at once affectedhim as implying that consequence. So far as he on the spot and for thenext hours took its measure--a process that made his night mercilesslywakeful--the consequences possibly implied were numerous todistraction. His spirit dealt with them, in the darkness, as the slowhours passed; his intelligence and his imagination, his soul and hissense, had never on the whole been so intensely engaged. It was hisdifficulty for the moment that he was face to face with alternatives,and that it was scarce even a question of turning from one to theother. They were not in a perspective in which they might be comparedand considered; they were, by a strange effect, as close as a pair ofmonsters of whom he might have felt on either cheek the hot breath andthe huge eyes. He saw them at once and but by looking straight beforehim; he wouldn't for that matter, in his cold apprehension, have turnedhis head by an inch. So it was that his agitation was still--was not,for the slow hours a matter of restless motion. He lay long, after theevent, on the sofa where, extinguishing at a touch the white light ofconvenience that he hated, he had thrown himself without undressing. Hestared at the buried day and wore out the time; with the arrival of theChristmas dawn moreover, late and grey, he felt himself somehowdetermined. The common wisdom had had its say to him--that safety indoubt was _not_ action; and perhaps what most helped him was this verycommonness. In his case there was nothing of _that_--in no case in hislife had there ever been less: which association, from one thing toanother, now worked for him as a choice. He acted, after his bath andhis breakfast, in the sense of that marked element of the rare which hefelt to be the sign of his crisis. And that is why, dressed with morestate than usual and quite as if for church, he went out into the softChristmas day.

  Action, for him, on coming to the point, it appeared, carried with it acertain complexity. We should have known, walking by his side, that hisfinal prime decision hadn't been to call at the door of Sir LukeStrett, and yet that this step, though subordinate, was none the lessurgent. His prime decision was for another matter, to which impatience,once he was on the way, had now added itself; but he remainedsufficiently aware that he must compromise with the perhaps excessiveearliness. This, and the ferment set up within him, were together areason for not driving; to say nothing of the absence of cabs in thedusky festal desert. Sir Luke's great square was not near, but hewalked the Distance without seeing a hansom. He had his interval thusto turn over his view--the view to which what had happened the nightbefore had not sharply reduced itself; but the complexity justmentioned was to be offered within the next few minutes another item toassimilate. Before Sir Luke's house, when he reached it, a brougham wasdrawn up--at the sight of which his heart had a lift that brought himfor the instant to a stand. This pause wasn't long, but it was longenough to flash upon him a revelation in the light of which he caughthis breath. The carriage, so possibly at such an hour and on such a daySir Luke's own, had struck him as a sign that the great doctor wasback. This would prove something else, in turn, still more intensely,and it was in the act of the double apprehension that Densher felthimself turn pale. His mind rebounded for the moment like a projectilethat has suddenly been met by another: he stared at the strange truththat what he wanted _more_ than to see Kate Croy was to see the witnesswho had just arrived from Venice. He wanted positively to be in hispresence and to hear his voice--which was the spasm of hisconsciousness that produced the flash. Fortunately for him, on thespot, there supervened something in which the flash went out. He becameaware within this minute that the coachman on the box of the broughamhad a face known to him, whereas he had never seen before, to hisknowledge, the great doctor's carriage. The carriage, as he camenearer, was simply Mrs. Lowder's; the face on the box was just the facethat, in coming and going at Lancaster Gate, he would vaguely havenoticed, outside, in attendance. With this the rest came: the lady ofLancaster Gate had, on a prompting not wholly remote from his own,presented herself for news; and news, in the house, she was clearlygetting, since her brougham had stayed. Sir Luke _was_ then back--onlyMrs. Lowder was with him.

  It was under the influence of this last reflexion that Densher againdelayed; and it was while he delayed that something else occurred tohim. It was all round, visibly--given his own new contribution--a caseof pressure; and in a case of pressure Kate, for quicker knowledge,might have come out with her aunt. The possibility that in this eventshe might be sitting in the carriage--the thing most likely--had hadthe effect, before he could check it, of bringing him within range ofthe window. It wasn't there he had wished to
see her; yet if she _was_there he couldn't pretend not to. What he had however the next momentmade out was that if some one was there it wasn't Kate Croy. It was,with a sensible shock for him, the person who had last offered him aconscious face from behind the clear plate of a cafe in Venice. Thegreat glass at Florian's was a medium less obscure, even with thewindow down, than the air of the London Christmas; yet at present also,none the less, between the two men, an exchange of recognitions couldoccur. Densher felt his own look a gaping arrest--which, he disgustedlyremembered, his back as quickly turned, appeared to repeat itself ashis special privilege. He mounted the steps of the house and touchedthe bell with a keen consciousness of being habitually looked at byKate's friend from positions of almost insolent vantage. He forgot forthe time the moment when, in Venice, at the palace, the encouragedyoung man had in a manner assisted at the departure of thedisconcerted, since Lord Mark was not looking disconcerted now any morethan he had looked from his bench at his cafe. Densher was thinkingthat _he_ seemed to show as vagrant while another was ensconced. He wasthinking of the other as--in spite of the difference of situation--moreensconced than ever; he was thinking of him above all as the friend ofthe person with whom his recognition had, the minute previous,associated him. The man was seated in the very place in which, besideMrs. Lowder's, he had looked to find Kate, and that was a sufficientidentity. Meanwhile at any rate the door of the house had opened andMrs. Lowder stood before him. It was something at least that _she_wasn't Kate. She was herself, on the spot, in all her affluence; withpresence of mind both to decide at once that Lord Mark, in thebrougham, didn't matter and to prevent Sir Luke's butler, by a firmword thrown over her shoulder, from standing there to listen to herpassage with the gentleman who had rung. "_I'll_ tell Mr. Densher; youneedn't wait!" And the passage, promptly and richly, took place on thesteps.

  "He arrives, travelling straight, to-morrow early. I couldn't not cometo learn."

  "No more," said Densher simply, "could I. On my way," he added, "toLancaster Gate."

  "Sweet of you." She beamed on him dimly, and he saw her face wasattuned. It made him, with what she had just before said, know all, andhe took the thing in while he met the air of portentous, of almostfunctional, sympathy that had settled itself as her medium with him andthat yet had now a fresh glow. "So you _have_ had your message?"

  He knew so well what she meant, and so equally with it what he "_had_had" no less than what he hadn't, that, with but the smallesthesitation, he strained the point. "Yes--my message."

  "Our dear dove then, as Kate calls her, has folded her wonderful wings."

  "Yes--folded them."

  It rather racked him, but he tried to receive it as she intended, andshe evidently took his formal assent for self-control. "Unless it'smore true," she accordingly added, "that she has spread them the wider."

  He again but formally assented, though, strangely enough, the wordsfitted a figure deep in his own imagination. "Rather, yes--spread themthe wider."

  "For a flight, I trust, to some happiness greater--!"

  "Exactly. Greater," Densher broke in; but now with a look, he feared,that did a little warn her off.

  "You were certainly," she went on with more reserve, "entitled todirect news. Ours came late last night: I'm not sure otherwise Ishouldn't have gone to you. But you're coming," she asked, "to _me?_"

  He had had a minute by this time to think further, and the window ofthe brougham was still within range. Her rich "me," reaching himmoreover through the mild damp, had the effect of a thump on his chest."Squared," Aunt Maud? She was indeed squared, and the extent of it justnow perversely enough took away his breath. His look from where theystood embraced the aperture at which the person sitting in the carriagemight have shown, and he saw his interlocutress, on her side,understand the question in it, which he moreover then uttered. "Shallyou be alone?" It was, as an immediate instinctive parley with theimage of his condition that now flourished in her, almost hypocritical.It sounded as if he wished to come and overflow to her, yet this wasexactly what he didn't. The need to overflow had suddenly--since thenight before--dried up in him, and he had never been aware of a deeperreserve.

  But she had meanwhile largely responded. "Completely alone. I shouldotherwise never have dreamed; feeling, dear friend, but too much!"Failing on her lips what she felt came out for him in the offered handwith which she had the next moment condolingly pressed his own. "Dearfriend, dear friend!"--she was deeply "with" him, and she wished to bestill more so: which was what made her immediately continue. "Orwouldn't you this evening, for the sad Christmas it makes us, dine withme _tete-a-tete?_"

  It put the thing off, the question of a talk with her--making thedifference, to his relief, of several hours; but it also rathermystified him. This however didn't diminish his need of caution. "Shallyou mind if I don't tell you at once?"

  "Not in the least--leave it open: it shall be as you may feel, and youneedn't even send me word. I only _will_ mention that to-day, of alldays, I shall otherwise sit there alone."

  Now at least he could ask. "Without Miss Croy?"

  "Without Miss Croy. Miss Croy," said Mrs. Lowder, "is spending herChristmas in the bosom of her more immediate family."

  He was afraid, even while he spoke, of what his face might show. "Youmean she has left you?"

  Aunt Maud's own face for that matter met the enquiry with aconsciousness in which he saw a reflexion of events. He was made sureby it, even at the moment and as he had never been before, that sincehe had known these two women no confessed nor commented tension, nocrisis of the cruder sort would really have taken form between them:which was precisely a high proof of how Kate had steered her boat. Thesituation exposed in Mrs. Lowder's present expression lighted up bycontrast that superficial smoothness; which afterwards, with his timeto think of it, was to put before him again the art, the particulargift, in the girl, now so placed and classed, so intimately familiarfor him, as her talent for life. The peace, within a day or two--sincehis seeing her last--had clearly been broken; differences, deep down,kept there by a diplomacy on Kate's part as deep, had been shaken tothe surface by some exceptional jar; with which, in addition, he feltLord Mark's odd attendance at such an hour and season vaguelyassociated. The talent for life indeed, it at the same time struck him,would probably have shown equally in the breach, or whatever hadoccurred; Aunt Maud having suffered, he judged, a strain rather than astroke. Of these quick thoughts, at all events, that lady was alreadyabreast. "She went yesterday morning--and not with my approval, I don'tmind telling you--to her sister: Mrs. Condrip, if you know who I mean,who lives somewhere in Chelsea. My other niece and her affairs--that Ishould have to say such things to-day!--are a constant worry; so thatKate, in consequence--well, of events!--has simply been called in. Myown idea, I'm bound to say, was that with _such_ events she need have,in her situation, next to nothing to do."

  "But she differed with you?"

  "She differed with me. And when Kate differs with you--!"

  "Oh I can imagine." He had reached the point in the scale of hypocrisyat which he could ask himself why a little more or less should signify.Besides, with the intention he had had he _must_ know. Kate's move, ifhe didn't know, might simply disconcert him; and of being disconcertedhis horror was by this time fairly superstitious. "I hope you don'tallude to events at all calamitous."

  "No--only horrid and vulgar."

  "Oh!" said Merton Densher.

  Mrs. Lowder's soreness, it was still not obscure, had discovered infree speech to him a momentary balm. "They've the misfortune to have, Isuppose you know, a dreadful horrible father."

  "Oh!" said Densher again.

  "He's too bad almost to name, but he has come upon Marian, and Marianhas shrieked for help."

  Densher wondered at this with intensity; and his curiosity compromisedfor an instant with his discretion. "Come upon her--for money?"

  "Oh for that of course always. But, at _this_ blessed season, forrefuge, for safety: for God knows what. He's
_there_, the brute. AndKate's with them. And that," Mrs. Lowder wound up, going down thesteps, "is her Christmas."

  She had stopped again at the bottom while he thought of an answer."Yours then is after all rather better."

  "It's at least more decent." And her hand once more came out. "But whydo I talk of _our_ troubles? Come if you can."

  He showed a faint smile. "Thanks. If I can."

  "And now--I dare say--you'll go to church?"

  She had asked it, with her good intention, rather in the air and by wayof sketching for him, in the line of support, something a little moreto the purpose than what she had been giving him. He felt it asfinishing off their intensities of expression that he found himself toall appearance receiving her hint as happy. "Why yes--I think I will":after which, as the door of the brougham, at her approach, had openedfrom within, he was free to turn his back. He heard the door, behindhim, sharply close again and the vehicle move off in another directionthan his own.

  He had in fact for the time no direction; in spite of which indeed hewas at the end of ten minutes aware of having walked straight to thesouth. That, he afterwards recognised, was, very sufficiently, becausethere had formed itself in his mind, even while Aunt Maud finallytalked, an instant recognition of his necessary course. Nothing wasopen to him but to follow Kate, nor was anything more marked than theinfluence of the step she had taken on the emotion itself thatpossessed him. Her complications, which had fairly, with everythingelse, an awful sound--what were they, a thousand times over, but hisown? His present business was to see that they didn't escape an hourlonger taking their proper place in his life. He accordingly would haveheld his course hadn't it suddenly come over him that he had just liedto Mrs. Lowder--a term it perversely eased him to keep using--even morethan was necessary. To what church was he going, to what church, insuch a state of his nerves, _could_ he go?--he pulled up short again,as he had pulled up in sight of Mrs. Lowder's carriage, to ask it. Andyet the desire queerly stirred in him not to have wasted his word. Hewas just then however by a happy chance in the Brompton Road, and hebethought himself with a sudden light that the Oratory was at hand. Hehad but to turn the other way and he should find himself soon beforeit. At the door then, in a few minutes, his idea was really--as itstruck him--consecrated: he was, pushing in, on the edge of a splendidservice--the flocking crowd told of it--which glittered and resounded,from distant depths, in the blaze of altar-lights and the swell oforgan and choir. It didn't match his own day, but it was much less of adiscord than some other things actual and possible. The Oratory inshort, to make him right, would do.

  IV

  The difference was thus that the dusk of afternoon--dusk thick from anearly hour--had gathered when he knocked at Mrs. Condrip's door. He hadgone from the church to his club, wishing not to present himself inChelsea at luncheon-time and also remembering that he must attemptindependently to make a meal. This, in the event, he but imperfectlyachieved: he dropped into a chair in the great dim void of the clublibrary, with nobody, up or down, to be seen, and there after a while,closing his eyes, recovered an hour of the sleep he had lost during thenight. Before doing this indeed he had written--it was the first thinghe did--a short note, which, in the Christmas desolation of the place,he had managed only with difficulty and doubt to commit to a messenger.He wished it carried by hand, and he was obliged, rather blindly, totrust the hand, as the messenger, for some reason, was unable to returnwith a gage of delivery. When at four o'clock he was face to face withKate in Mrs. Condrip's small drawing-room he found to his relief thathis notification had reached her. She was expectant and to that extentprepared; which simplified a little--if a little, at the present pass,counted. Her conditions were vaguely vivid to him from the moment ofhis coming in, and vivid partly by their difference, a difference sharpand suggestive, from those in which he had hitherto constantly seenher. He had seen her but in places comparatively great; in her aunt'spompous house, under the high trees of Kensington and the storiedceilings of Venice. He had seen her, in Venice, on a great occasion, asthe centre itself of the splendid Piazza: he had seen her there, on astill greater one, in his own poor rooms, which yet had consorted withher, having state and ancientry even in their poorness; but Mrs.Condrip's interior, even by this best view of it and though notflagrantly mean, showed itself as a setting almost grotesquely inapt.Pale, grave and charming, she affected him at once as a distinguishedstranger--a stranger to the little Chelsea street--who was making thebest of a queer episode and a place of exile. The extraordinary thingwas that at the end of three minutes he felt himself less appointedly astranger in it than she.

  A part of the queerness--this was to come to him in glimpses--sprangfrom the air as of a general large misfit imposed on the narrow room bythe scale and mass of its furniture. The objects, the ornaments were,for the sisters, clearly relics and survivals of what would, in thecase of Mrs. Condrip at least, have been called better days. Thecurtains that overdraped the windows, the sofas and tables that stayedcirculation, the chimney-ornaments that reached to the ceiling and theflorid chandelier that almost dropped to the floor, were so manymementoes of earlier homes and so many links with their unhappy mother.Whatever might have been in itself the quality of these elementsDensher could feel the effect proceeding from them, as they lumpishlyblocked out the decline of the dim day, to be ugly almost to the pointof the sinister. They failed to accommodate or to compromise; theyasserted their differences without tact and without taste. It was trulyhaving a sense of Kate's own quality thus promptly to see them inreference to it. But that Densher had this sense was no new thing tohim, nor did he in strictness need, for the hour, to be reminded of it.He only knew, by one of the tricks his imagination so constantly playedhim, that he was, so far as her present tension went, very speciallysorry for her--which was not the view that had determined his start inthe morning; yet also that he himself would have taken it all, as hemight say, less hard. _He_ could have lived in such a place; but itwasn't given to those of his complexion, so to speak, to be exiledanywhere. It was by their comparative grossness that they could somehowmake shift. His natural, his inevitable, his ultimate home--left, thatis, to itself--wasn't at all unlikely to be as queer and impossible aswhat was just round them, though doubtless in less ample masses. As hetook in moreover how Kate wouldn't have been in the least the creatureshe was if what was just round them hadn't mismatched her, hadn't madefor her a medium involving compunction in the spectator, so, by thesame stroke, that became the very fact of her relation with hercompanions there, such a fact as filled him at once, oddly, both withassurance and with suspense. If he himself, on this brief vision, felther as alien and as ever so unwittingly ironic, how must they not feelher and how above all must she not feel them?

  Densher could ask himself that even after she had presently lighted thetall candles on the mantel-shelf. This was all their illumination butthe fire, and she had proceeded to it with a quiet dryness that yetleft play, visibly, to her implication between them, in their troubleand failing anything better, of the presumably genial Christmas hearth.So far as the genial went this had in strictness, given theirconditions, to be all their geniality. He had told her in his notenothing but that he must promptly see her and that he hoped she mightbe able to make it possible; but he understood from the first look ather that his promptitude was already having for her its principalreference. "I was prevented this morning, in the few minutes," heexplained, "asking Mrs. Lowder if she had let you know, though I rathergathered she had; and it's what I've been in fact since then assuming.It was because I was so struck at the moment with your having, as shedid tell me, so suddenly come here."

  "Yes, it was sudden enough." Very neat and fine in the contractedfirelight, with her hands in her lap, Kate considered what he had said.He had spoken immediately of what had happened at Sir Luke Strett'sdoor. "She has let me know nothing. But that doesn't matter--if it'swhat _you_ mean."

  "It's part of what I mean," Densher said; but what he went on with,after a pause durin
g which she waited, was apparently not the rest ofthat. "She had had her telegram from Mrs. Stringham; late last night.But to me the poor lady hasn't wired. The event," he added, "will havetaken place yesterday, and Sir Luke, starting immediately, one can see,and travelling straight, will get back to-morrow morning. So that Mrs.Stringham, I judge, is left to face in some solitude the situationbequeathed to her. But of course," he wound up, "Sir Luke couldn'tstay."

  Her look at him might have had in it a vague betrayal of the sense thathe was gaining time. "Was your telegram from Sir Luke?"

  "No--I've had no telegram."

  She wondered. "But not a letter--?"

  "Not from Mrs. Stringham--no." He failed again however to developthis--for which her forbearance from another question gave himoccasion. From whom then had he heard? He might at last, confrontedwith her, really have been gaining time; and as if to show that sherespected this impulse she made her enquiry different. "Should you liketo go out to her--to Mrs. Stringham?"

  About that at least he was clear. "Not at all. She's alone, but she'svery capable and very courageous. Besides--!" He had been going on, buthe dropped.

  "Besides," she said, "there's Eugenio? Yes, of course one remembersEugenio."

  She had uttered the words as definitely to show them for not untender;and he showed equally every reason to assent. "One remembers himindeed, and with every ground for it. He'll be of the highest value toher--he's capable of anything. What I was going to say," he went on,"is that some of their people from America must quickly arrive."

  On this, as happened, Kate was able at once to satisfy him. "Mr.Someone-or-other, the person principally in charge of Milly'saffairs--her first trustee, I suppose--had just got there at Mrs.Stringham's last writing."

  "Ah that then was after your aunt last spoke to me--I mean the lasttime before this morning. I'm relieved to hear it. So," he said,"they'll do."

  "Oh they'll do." And it came from each still as if it wasn't what eachwas most thinking of. Kate presently got however a step nearer to that."But if you had been wired to by nobody what then this morning hadtaken you to Sir Luke?"

  "Oh something else--which I'll presently tell you. It's what made meinstantly need to see you; it's what I've come to speak to you of. Butin a minute. I feel too many things," he went on, "at seeing you inthis place." He got up as he spoke; she herself remained perfectlystill. His movement had been to the fire, and, leaning a little, withhis back to it, to look down on her from where he stood, he confinedhimself to his point. "Is it anything very bad that has brought you?"

  He had now in any case said enough to justify her wish for more; sothat, passing this matter by, she pressed her own challenge. "Do youmean, if I may ask, that _she_, dying--?" Her face, wondering, pressedit more than her words.

  "Certainly you may ask," he after a moment said. "What has come to meis what, as I say, I came expressly to tell you. I don't mind lettingyou know," he went on, "that my decision to do this took for me lastnight and this morning a great deal of thinking of. But here I am." Andhe indulged in a smile that couldn't, he was well aware, but strike heras mechanical.

  She went straighter with him, she seemed to show, than he really wentwith her. "You didn't want to come?"

  "It would have been simple, my dear"--and he continued to smile--"if ithad been, one way or the other, only a question of 'wanting.' It took,I admit it, the idea of what I had best do, all sorts of difficult andportentous forms. It came up for me really--well, not at all for myhappiness."

  This word apparently puzzled her--she studied him in the light of it."You look upset--you've certainly been tormented. You're not well."

  "Oh--well enough!"

  But she continued without heeding. "You hate what you're doing."

  "My dear girl, you simplify"--and he was now serious enough. "It isn'tso simple even as that."

  She had the air of thinking what it then might be. "I of course can't,with no clue, know what it is." She remained none the less patient andstill. "If at such a moment she could write you one's inevitably quiteat sea. One doesn't, with the best will in the world, understand." Andthen as Densher had a pause which might have stood for all the involvedexplanation that, to his discouragement, loomed before him: "You_haven't_ decided what to do."

  She had said it very gently, almost sweetly, and he didn't instantlysay otherwise. But he said so after a look at her. "Oh yes--I have.Only with this sight of you here and what I seem to see in it foryou--!" And his eyes, as at suggestions that pressed, turned from onepart of the room to another.

  "Horrible place, isn't it?" said Kate.

  It brought him straight back to his enquiry. "Is it for anything awfulyou've had to come?"

  "Oh that will take as long to tell you as anything _you_ may have.Don't mind," she continued, "the 'sight of me here,' norwhatever--which is more than I yet know myself--may be 'in it' for me.And kindly consider too that, after all, if you're in trouble I can alittle wish to help you. Perhaps I can absolutely even do it."

  "My dear child, it's just because of the sense of your wish--! Isuppose I'm in trouble--I suppose that's it." He said this with so odda suddenness of simplicity that she could only stare for it--which heas promptly saw. So he turned off as he could his vagueness. "And yet Ioughtn't to be." Which sounded indeed vaguer still.

  She waited a moment. "Is it, as you say for my own business, anythingvery awful?"

  "Well," he slowly replied, "you'll tell me if you find it so. I mean ifyou find my idea--"

  He was so slow that she took him up. "Awful?" A sound ofimpatience--the form of a laugh--at last escaped her. "I can't find itanything at all till I know what you're talking about."

  It brought him then more to the point, though it did so at first but bymaking him, on the hearthrug before her, with his hands in his pockets,turn awhile to and fro. There rose in him even with this movement arecall of another time--the hour in Venice, the hour of gloom andstorm, when Susan Shepherd had sat in his quarters there very much asKate was sitting now, and he had wondered, in pain even as now, what hemight say and mightn't. Yet the present occasion after all was somehowthe easier. He tried at any rate to attach that feeling to it while hestopped before his companion. "The communication I speak of can'tpossibly belong--so far as its date is concerned--to these last days.The postmark, which is legible, does; but it isn't thinkable, foranything else, that she wrote--!" He dropped, looking at her as ifshe'd understand.

  It was easy to understand. "On her deathbed?" But Kate took aninstant's thought. "Aren't we agreed that there was never any one inthe world like her?"

  "Yes." And looking over her head he spoke clearly enough. "There wasnever any one in the world like her."

  Kate, from her chair, always without a movement, raised her eyes to theunconscious reach of his own. Then when the latter again dropped to hershe added a question. "And won't it further depend a little on what thecommunication is?"

  "A little perhaps--but not much. It's a communication," said Densher.

  "Do you mean a letter?"

  "Yes, a letter. Addressed to me in her hand--in hers unmistakeably."

  Kate thought. "Do you know her hand very well?"

  "Oh perfectly."

  It was as if his tone for this prompted--with a slight strangeness--hernext demand. "Have you had many letters from her?"

  "No. Only three notes." He spoke looking straight at her. "And very,very short ones."

  "Ah," said Kate, "the number doesn't matter. Three lines would beenough if you're sure you remember."

  "I'm sure I remember. Besides," Densher continued, "I've seen her handin other ways. I seem to recall how you once, before she went toVenice, showed me one of her notes precisely _for_ that. And then sheonce copied me something."

  "Oh," said Kate almost with a smile, "I don't ask you for the detail ofyour reasons. One good one's enough." To which however she added as ifprecisely not to speak with impatience or with anything like irony:"And the writing has its usual look?"

&
nbsp; Densher answered as if even to better that description of it. "It'sbeautiful."

  "Yes--it _was_ beautiful. Well," Kate, to defer to him still, furtherremarked, "it's not news to us now that she was stupendous. Anything'spossible."

  "Yes, anything's possible"--he appeared oddly to catch at it. "That'swhat I say to myself. It's what I've been believing you," he a triflevaguely explained, "still more certain to feel."

  She waited for him to say more, but he only, with his hands in hispockets, turned again away, going this time to the single window of theroom, where in the absence of lamplight the blind hadn't been drawn. Helooked out into the lamplit fog, lost himself in the small sordidLondon street--for sordid, with his other association, he felt it--ashe had lost himself, with Mrs. Stringham's eyes on him, in the vista ofthe Grand Canal. It was present then to his recording consciousnessthat when he had last been driven to such an attitude the very depth ofhis resistance to the opportunity to give Kate away was what had sodriven him. His waiting companion had on that occasion waited for himto say he _would_; and what he had meantime glowered forth at was theinanity of such a hope. Kate's attention, on her side, during theseminutes, rested on the back and shoulders he thus familiarlypresented--rested as with a view of their expression, a reference tothings unimparted, links still missing and that she must ever miss, tryto make them out as she would. The result of her tension was that sheagain took him up. "You received--what you spoke of--last night?"

  It made him turn round. "Coming in from Fleet Street--earlier by anhour than usual--I found it with some other letters on my table. But myeyes went straight to it, in an extraordinary way, from the door. Irecognised it, knew what it was, without touching it."

  "One can understand." She listened with respect. His tone however wasso singular that she presently added: "You speak as if all this whileyou _hadn't_ touched it."

  "Oh yes, I've touched it. I feel as if, ever since, I'd been touchingnothing else. I quite firmly," he pursued as if to be plainer, "tookhold of it."

  "Then where is it?"

  "Oh I have it here."

  "And you've brought it to show me?"

  "I've brought it to show you."

  So he said with a distinctness that had, among his other oddities,almost a sound of cheer, yet making no movement that matched his words.She could accordingly but offer again her expectant face, while hisown, to her impatience, seemed perversely to fill with another thought."But now that you've done so you feel you don't want to."

  "I want to immensely," he said. "Only you tell me nothing."

  She smiled at him, with this, finally, as if he were an unreasonablechild. "It seems to me I tell you quite as much as you tell me. Youhaven't yet even told me how it is that such explanations as yourequire don't come from your document itself." Then as he answerednothing she had a flash. "You mean you haven't read it?"

  "I haven't read it."

  She stared. "Then how am I to help you with it?"

  Again leaving her while she never budged he paced five strides, andagain he was before her. "By telling me _this_. It's something, youknow, that you wouldn't tell me the other day."

  She was vague. "The other day?"

  "The first time after my return--the Sunday I came to you. What's hedoing," Densher went on, "at that hour of the morning with her? Whatdoes his having been with her there mean?"

  "Of whom are you talking?"

  "Of that man--Lord Mark of course. What does it represent?"

  "Oh with Aunt Maud?"

  "Yes, my dear--and with you. It comes more or less to the same thing;and it's what you didn't tell me the other day when I put you thequestion."

  Kate tried to remember the other day. "You asked me nothing about anyhour."

  "I asked you when it was you last saw him--previous, I mean, to hissecond descent at Venice. You wouldn't say, and as we were talking of amatter comparatively more important I let it pass. But the factremains, you know, my dear, that you haven't told me."

  Two things in this speech appeared to have reached Kate more distinctlythan the others. "I 'wouldn't say'?--and you 'let it pass'?" She lookedjust coldly blank. "You really speak as if I were keeping somethingback."

  "Well, you see," Densher persisted, "you're not even telling me now.All I want to know," he nevertheless explained, "is whether there was aconnexion between that proceeding on his part, which waspractically--oh beyond all doubt!--the shock precipitating for her whathas now happened, and anything that had occurred with him previouslyfor yourself. How in the world did he know we're engaged?"

  V

  Kate slowly rose; it was, since she had lighted the candles and satdown, the first movement she had made. "Are you trying to fix it on methat I must have told him?"

  She spoke not so much in resentment as in pale dismay--which he showedhe immediately took in. "My dear child, I'm not trying to 'fix'anything; but I'm extremely tormented and I seem not to understand.What has the brute to do with us anyway?"

  "What has he indeed?" Kate asked.

  She shook her head as if in recovery, within the minute, of some mildallowance for his unreason. There was in it--and for his reasonreally--one of those half-inconsequent sweetnesses by which she hadoften before made, over some point of difference, her own terms withhim. Practically she was making them now, and essentially he wasknowing it; yet inevitably, all the same, he was accepting it. Shestood there close to him, with something in her patience that suggestedher having supposed, when he spoke more appealingly, that he was goingto kiss her. He hadn't been, it appeared; but his continued appeal wasnone the less the quieter. "What's he doing, from ten o'clock onChristmas morning, with Mrs. Lowder?"

  Kate looked surprised. "Didn't she tell you he's staying there?"

  "At Lancaster Gate?" Densher's surprise met it. "'Staying'?--sincewhen?"

  "Since day before yesterday. He was there before I came away." And thenshe explained--confessing it in fact anomalous. "It's an accident--likeAunt Maud's having herself remained in town for Christmas, but it isn'tafter all so monstrous. _We_ stayed--and, with my having come here,she's sorry now--because we neither of us, waiting from day to day forthe news you brought, seemed to want to be with a lot of people."

  "You stayed for thinking of--Venice?"

  "Of course we did. For what else? And even a little," Kate wonderfullyadded--"it's true at least of Aunt Maud--for thinking of you."

  He appreciated. "I see. Nice of you every way. But whom," he enquired,"has Lord Mark stayed for thinking of?"

  "His being in London, I believe, is a very commonplace matter. He hassome rooms which he has had suddenly some rather advantageous chance tolet--such as, with his confessed, his decidedly proclaimed want ofmoney, he hasn't had it in him, in spite of everything, not to jump at."

  Densher's attention was entire. "In spite of everything? In spite ofwhat?"

  "Well, I don't know. In spite, say, of his being scarcely supposed todo that sort of thing."

  "To try to get money?"

  "To try at any rate in little thrifty ways. Apparently however he hashad for some reason to do what he can. He turned at a couple of days'notice out of his place, making it over to his tenant; and Aunt Maud,who's deeply in his confidence about all such matters, said: 'Come thento Lancaster Gate--to sleep at least--till, like all the world, you goto the country.' He was to have gone to the country--I think toMatcham--yesterday afternoon: Aunt Maud, that is, told me he was."

  Kate had been somehow, for her companion, through this statement,beautifully, quite soothingly, suggestive. "Told you, you mean, so thatyou needn't leave the house?"

  "Yes--so far as she had taken it into her head that his being there waspart of my reason."

  "And _was_ it part of your reason?"

  "A little if you like. Yet there's plenty here--as I knew there wouldbe--without it. So that," she said candidly, "doesn't matter. I'm gladI am here: even if for all the good I do--!" She implied however thatthat didn't matter either. "He didn't, as you tell me, g
et off then toMatcham; though he may possibly, if it is possible, be going thisafternoon. But what strikes me as most probable--and it's really, I'mbound to say, quite amiable of him--is that he has declined to leaveAunt Maud, as I've been so ready to do, to spend her Christmas alone.If moreover he has given up Matcham for her it's a _procede_ that won'tplease her less. It's small wonder therefore that she insists, on adull day, in driving him about. I don't pretend to know," she wound up,"what may happen between them; but that's all I see in it."

  "You see in everything, and you always did," Densher returned,"something that, while I'm with you at least, I always take from you asthe truth itself."

  She looked at him as if consciously and even carefully extracting thesting of his reservation; then she spoke with a quiet gravity thatseemed to show how fine she found it. "Thank you." It had for him, likeeverything else, its effect. They were still closely face to face, and,yielding to the impulse to which he hadn't yielded just before, he laidhis hands on her shoulders, held her hard a minute and shook her alittle, far from untenderly, as if in expression of more mingledthings, all difficult, than he could speak. Then bending his head heapplied his lips to her cheek. He fell, after this, away for aninstant, resuming his unrest, while she kept the position in which, allpassive and as a statue, she had taken his demonstration. It didn'tprevent her, however, from offering him, as if what she had had wasenough for the moment, a further indulgence. She made a quiet lucidconnexion and as she made it sat down again. "I've been trying to placeexactly, as to its date, something that did happen to me while you werein Venice. I mean a talk with him. He spoke to me--spoke out."

  "Ah there you are!" said Densher who had wheeled round.

  "Well, if I'm 'there,' as you so gracefully call it, by having refusedto meet him as he wanted--as he pressed--I plead guilty to being so.Would you have liked me," she went on, "to give him an answer thatwould have kept him from going?"

  It made him a little awkwardly think. "Did you know he was going?"

  "Never for a moment; but I'm afraid that--even if it doesn't fit yourstrange suppositions--I should have given him just the same answer if Ihad known. If it's a matter I haven't, since your return, thrust uponyou, that's simply because it's not a matter in the memory of which Ifind a particular joy. I hope that if I've satisfied you about it," shecontinued, "it's not too much to ask of you to let it rest."

  "Certainly," said Densher kindly, "I'll let it rest." But the nextmoment he pursued: "He saw something. He guessed."

  "If you mean," she presently returned, "that he was unfortunately theone person we hadn't deceived, I can't contradict you."

  "No--of course not. But _why_," Densher still risked, "was heunfortunately the one person--? He's not really a bit intelligent."

  "Intelligent enough apparently to have seen a mystery, a riddle, inanything so unnatural as--all things considered and when it came to thepoint--my attitude. So he gouged out his conviction, and on hisconviction he acted."

  Densher seemed for a little to look at Lord Mark's conviction as if itwere a blot on the face of nature. "Do you mean because you hadappeared to him to have encouraged him?"

  "Of course I had been decent to him. Otherwise where _were_ we?"

  "'Where'--?"

  "You and I. What I appeared to him, however, hadn't mattered. Whatmattered was how I appeared to Aunt Maud. Besides, you must rememberthat he has had all along his impression of _you_. You can't help it,"she said, "but you're after all--well, yourself."

  "As much myself as you please. But when I took myself to Venice andkept myself there--what," Densher asked, "did he make of that?"

  "Your being in Venice and liking to be--which is never on any one'spart a monstrosity--was explicable for him in other ways. He was quitecapable moreover of seeing it as dissimulation."

  "In spite of Mrs. Lowder?"

  "No," said Kate, "not in spite of Mrs. Lowder now. Aunt Maud, beforewhat you call his second descent, hadn't convinced him--all the morethat my refusal of him didn't help. But he came back convinced." Andthen as her companion still showed a face at a loss: "I mean after hehad seen Milly, spoken to her and left her. Milly convinced him."

  "Milly?" Densher again but vaguely echoed.

  "That you were sincere. That it was _her_ you loved." It came to himfrom her in such a way that he instantly, once more, turned, foundhimself yet again at his window. "Aunt Maud, on his return here," shemeanwhile continued, "had it from him. And that's why you're now sowell with Aunt Maud."

  He only for a minute looked out in silence--after which he came away."And why _you_ are." It was almost, in its extremely affirmative effectbetween them, the note of recrimination; or it would have been perhapsrather if it hadn't been so much more the note of truth. It was sharpbecause it was true, but its truth appeared to impose it as an argumentso conclusive as to permit on neither side a sequel. That made, whilethey faced each other over it without speech, the gravity ofeverything. It was as if there were almost danger, which the wrong wordmight start. Densher accordingly at last acted to better purpose: hedrew, standing there before her, a pocket-book from the breast of hiswaistcoat and he drew from the pocket-book a folded letter to which hereyes attached themselves. He restored then the receptacle to its placeand, with a movement not the less odd for being visibly instinctive andunconscious, carried the hand containing his letter behind him. What hethus finally spoke of was a different matter. "Did I understand fromMrs. Lowder that your father's in the house?"

  If it never had taken her long in such excursions to meet him it wasnot to take her so now. "In the house, yes. But we needn't fear hisinterruption"--she spoke as if he had thought of that. "He's in bed."

  "Do you mean with illness?"

  She sadly shook her head. "Father's never ill. He's a marvel. He'sonly--endless."

  Densher thought. "Can I in any way help you with him?"

  "Yes." She perfectly, wearily, almost serenely, had it all. "By ourmaking your visit as little of an affair as possible for him--and forMarian too."

  "I see. They hate so your seeing me. Yet I couldn't--could I?--not havecome."

  "No, you couldn't not have come."

  "But I can only, on the other hand, go as soon as possible?"

  Quickly it almost upset her. "Ah don't, to-day, put ugly words into mymouth. I've enough of my trouble without it."

  "I know--I know!" He spoke in instant pleading. "It's all only that I'mas troubled _for_ you. When did he come?"

  "Three days ago--after he hadn't been near her for more than a year,after he had apparently, and not regrettably, ceased to remember herexistence; and in a state which made it impossible not to take him in."

  Densher hesitated. "Do you mean in such want--?"

  "No, not of food, of necessary things--not even, so far as hisappearance went, of money. He looked as wonderful as ever. But hewas--well, in terror."

  "In terror of what?"

  "I don't know. Of somebody--of something. He wants, he says, to bequiet. But his quietness is awful."

  She suffered, but he couldn't not question. "What does he do?"

  It made Kate herself hesitate. "He cries."

  Again for a moment he hung fire, but he risked it. "What _has_ he done?"

  It made her slowly rise, and they were once more fully face to face.Her eyes held his own and she was paler than she had been. "If you loveme--now--don't ask me about father."

  He waited again a moment. "I love you. It's because I love you that I'mhere. It's because I love you that I've brought you this." And he drewfrom behind him the letter that had remained in his hand.

  But her eyes only--though he held it out--met the offer. "Why you'venot broken the seal!"

  "If I had broken the seal--exactly--I should know what's within. It'sfor _you_ to break the seal that I bring it."

  She looked--still not touching the thing--inordinately grave. "To breakthe seal of something to you from _her?_"

  "Ah precisely because it's from her. I'll abide by whateve
r you thinkof it."

  "I don't understand," said Kate. "What do you yourself think?" And thenas he didn't answer: "It seems to me _I_ think you know. You have yourinstinct. You don't need to read. It's the proof."

  Densher faced her words as if they had been an accusation, anaccusation for which he was prepared and which there was but one way toface. "I have indeed my instinct. It came to me, while I worried itout, last night. It came to me as an effect of the hour." He held uphis letter and seemed now to insist more than to confess. "This thinghad been timed."

  "For Christmas Eve?"

  "For Christmas Eve."

  Kate had suddenly a strange smile. "The season of gifts!" After which,as he said nothing, she went on: "And had been written, you mean, whileshe could write, and kept to _be_ so timed?"

  Only meeting her eyes while he thought, he again didn't reply. "What do_you_ mean by the proof?"

  "Why of the beauty with which you've been loved. But I won't," shesaid, "break your seal."

  "You positively decline?"

  "Positively. Never." To which she added oddly: "I know without."

  He had another pause. "And what is it you know?"

  "That she announces to you she has made you rich."

  His pause this time was longer. "Left me her fortune?"

  "Not all of it, no doubt, for it's immense. But money to a largeamount. I don't care," Kate went on, "to know how much." And herstrange smile recurred. "I trust her."

  "Did she tell you?" Densher asked.

  "Never!" Kate visibly flushed at the thought. "That wouldn't, on mypart, have been playing fair with her. And I did," she added, "playfair."

  Densher, who had believed her--he couldn't help it--continued, holdinghis letter, to face her. He was much quieter now, as if his torment hadsomehow passed. "You played fair with me, Kate; and that's why--sincewe talk of proofs--I want to give _you_ one. I've wanted to let yousee--and in preference even to myself--something I feel as sacred."

  She frowned a little. "I don't understand."

  "I've asked myself for a tribute, for a sacrifice by which I canpeculiarly recognise--"

  "Peculiarly recognise what?" she demanded as he dropped.

  "The admirable nature of your own sacrifice. You were capable in Veniceof an act of splendid generosity."

  "And the privilege you offer me with that document is my reward?"

  He made a movement. "It's all I can do as a symbol of my attitude."

  She looked at him long. "Your attitude, my dear, is that you're afraidof yourself. You've had to take yourself in hand. You've had to doyourself violence."

  "So it is then you meet me?"

  She bent her eyes hard a moment to the letter, from which her handstill stayed itself. "You absolutely _desire_ me to take it?"

  "I absolutely desire you to take it."

  "To do what I like with it?"

  "Short of course of making known its terms. It must remain--pardon mymaking the point--between you and me."

  She had a last hesitation, but she presently broke it. "Trust me."Taking from him the sacred script she held it a little while her eyesagain rested on those fine characters of Milly's that they had shortlybefore discussed. "To hold it," she brought out, "is to know."

  "Oh I _know!_" said Merton Densher.

  "Well then if we both do--!" She had already turned to the fire, nearerto which she had moved, and with a quick gesture had jerked the thinginto the flame. He started--but only half--as to undo her action: hisarrest was as prompt as the latter had been decisive. He only watched,with her, the paper burn; after which their eyes again met. "You'llhave it all," Kate said, "from New York."

  It was after he had in fact, two months later, heard from New York thatshe paid him a visit one morning at his own quarters--coming not as shehad come in Venice, under his extreme solicitation, but as a needrecognised in the first instance by herself, even though also as theprompt result of a missive delivered to her. This had consisted of anote from Densher accompanying a letter, "just to hand," addressed himby an eminent American legal firm, a firm of whose high character hehad become conscious while in New York as of a thing in the air itself,and whose head and front, the principal executor of Milly Theale'scopious will, had been duly identified at Lancaster Gate as thegentleman hurrying out, by the straight southern course, before thegirl's death, to the support of Mrs. Stringham. Densher's act onreceipt of the document in question--an act as to which and to thebearings of which his resolve had had time to mature--constituted instrictness, singularly enough, the first reference to Milly, or to whatMilly might or might not have done, that had passed between our pairsince they had stood together watching the destruction, in the littlevulgar grate at Chelsea, of the undisclosed work of her hand. They hadat the time, and in due deference now, on his part, to Kate's mentionof her responsibility for his call, immediately separated, and whenthey met again the subject was made present to them--at all events tillsome flare of new light--only by the intensity with which it mutelyexpressed its absence. They were not moreover in these weeks to meetoften, in spite of the fact that this had, during January and a part ofFebruary, actually become for them a comparatively easy matter. Kate'sstay at Mrs. Condrip's prolonged itself under allowances from her auntwhich would have been a mystery to Densher had he not been admitted, atLancaster Gate, really in spite of himself, to the esoteric view ofthem. "It's her idea," Mrs. Lowder had there said to him as if shereally despised ideas--which she didn't; "and I've taken up with myown, which is to give her her head till she has had enough of it. She_has_ had enough of it, she had that soon enough; but as she's as proudas the deuce she'll come back when she has found some reason--havingnothing in common with her disgust--of which she can make a show. Shecalls it her holiday, which she's spending in her own way--the holidayto which, once a year or so, as she says, the very maids in thescullery have a right. So we're taking it on that basis. But we shallnot soon, I think, take another of the same sort. Besides, she's quitedecent; she comes often--whenever I make her a sign; and she has beengood, on the whole, this year or two, so that, to be decent myself, Idon't complain. She has really been, poor dear, very much what onehoped; though I needn't, you know," Aunt Maud wound up, "tell _you_,after all, you clever creature, what that was."

  It had been partly in truth to keep down the opportunity for this thatDensher's appearances under the good lady's roof markedly, afterChristmas, interspaced themselves. The phase of his situation that onhis return from Venice had made them for a short time almost frequentwas at present quite obscured, and with it the impulse that had thenacted. Another phase had taken its place, which he would have beenpainfully at a loss as yet to name or otherwise set on its feet, but ofwhich the steadily rising tide left Mrs. Lowder, for his desire, quitehigh and dry. There had been a moment when it seemed possible that Mrs.Stringham, returning to America under convoy, would pause in London onher way and be housed with her old friend; in which case he wasprepared for some apparent zeal of attendance. But this dangerpassed--he had felt it a danger, and the person in the world whom hewould just now have most valued seeing on his own terms sailed awaywestward from Genoa. He thereby only wrote to her, having broken, inthis respect, after Milly's death, the silence as to the sense ofwhich, before that event, their agreement had been so deep. She hadanswered him from Venice twice, and had had time to answer him twiceagain from New York. The last letter of her four had come by the samepost as the document he sent on to Kate, but he hadn't gone into thequestion of also enclosing that. His correspondence with Milly'scompanion was somehow already presenting itself to him as a feature--asa factor, he would have said in his newspaper--of the time whatever itmight be, long or short, in store for him; but one of his acutestcurrent thoughts was apt to be devoted to his not having yet mentionedit to Kate. She had put him no question, no "Don't you ever hear?"--sothat he hadn't been brought to the point. This he described to himselfas a mercy, for he liked his secret. It was as a secret that, in thesame personal privacy, he descri
bed his transatlantic commerce, scarceeven wincing while he recognised it as the one connexion in which hewasn't straight. He had in fact for this connexion a vivid mentalimage--he saw it as a small emergent rock in the waste of waters, thebottomless grey expanse of straightness. The fact that he had onseveral recent occasions taken with Kate an out-of-the-way walk thatwas each time to define itself as more remarkable for what they didn'tsay than for what they did--this fact failed somehow to mitigate forhim a strange consciousness of exposure. There was something deepwithin him that he had absolutely shown to no one--to the companion ofthese walks in particular not a bit more than he could help; but he wasnone the less haunted, under its shadow, with a dire apprehension ofpublicity. It was as if he had invoked that ugliness in some stupidgood faith; and it was queer enough that on his emergent rock, clingingto it and to Susan Shepherd, he should figure himself as hidden fromview. That represented no doubt his belief in her power, or in herdelicate disposition to protect him. Only Kate at all events knew--whatKate did know, and she was also the last person interested to tell it;in spite of which it was as if his _act_, so deeply associated with herand never to be recalled nor recovered, was abroad on the winds of theworld. His honesty, as he viewed it with Kate, was the very element ofthat menace: to the degree that he saw at moments, as to their finalimpulse or their final remedy, the need to bury in the dark blindnessof each other's arms the knowledge of each other that they couldn'tundo.

  Save indeed that the sense in which it was in these days a question ofarms was limited, this might have been the intimate expedient to whichthey were actually resorting. It had its value, in conditions that madeeverything count, that thrice over, in Battersea Park--where Mrs.Lowder now never drove--he had adopted the usual means, in sequesteredalleys, of holding her close to his side. She could make absences, onher present footing, without having too inordinately to account forthem at home--which was exactly what gave them for the first time anappreciable margin. He supposed she could always say in Chelsea--thoughhe didn't press it--that she had been across the town, in decency, fora look at her aunt; whereas there had always been reasons at LancasterGate for her not being able to plead the look at her other relatives.It was therefore between them a freedom of a purity as yet untasted;which for that matter also they made in various ways no little show ofcherishing as such. They made the show indeed in every way but the wayof a large use--an inconsequence that they almost equally gave time tohelping each other to regard as natural. He put it to his companionthat the kind of favour he now enjoyed at Lancaster Gate, the wonderfulwarmth of his reception there, cut in a manner the ground from undertheir feet. He was too horribly trusted--they had succeeded too well.He couldn't in short make appointments with her without abusing AuntMaud, and he couldn't on the other hand haunt that lady without tyinghis hands. Kate saw what he meant just as he saw what she did when sheadmitted that she was herself, to a degree scarce less embarrassing, inthe enjoyment of Aunt Maud's confidence. It was special at present--shewas handsomely used; she confessed accordingly to a scruple aboutmisapplying her licence. Mrs. Lowder then finally had found--and allunconsciously now--the way to baffle them. It wasn't however that theydidn't meet a little, none the less, in the southern quarter, to pointfor their common benefit the moral of their defeat. They crossed theriver; they wandered in neighbourhoods sordid and safe; the winter wasmild, so that, mounting to the top of trams, they could rumble togetherto Clapham or to Greenwich. If at the same time their minutes had neverbeen so counted it struck Densher that by a singular law their tone--hescarce knew what to call it--had never been so bland. Not to talk ofwhat they _might_ have talked of drove them to other ground; it was asif they used a perverse insistence to make up what they ignored. Theyconcealed their pursuit of the irrelevant by the charm of their manner;they took precautions for the courtesy they had formerly left to comeof itself; often, when he had quitted her, he stopped short, walkingoff, with the aftersense of their change. He would have described theirchange--had he so far faced it as to describe it--by their being sodamned civil. That had even, with the intimate, the familiar at thepoint to which they had brought them, a touch almost of the droll. Whatdanger had there ever been of their becoming rude--after each had longsince made the other so tremendously tender? Such were the things heasked himself when he wondered what in particular he most feared.

  Yet all the while too the tension had its charm--such being theinterest of a creature who could bring one back to her by suchdifferent roads. It was her talent for life again; which found in her adifference for the differing time. She didn't give their tradition up;she but made of it something new. Frankly moreover she had never beenmore agreeable nor in a way--to put it prosaically--better company: hefelt almost as if he were knowing her on that defined basis--which heeven hesitated whether to measure as reduced or as extended; as if atall events he were admiring her as she was probably admired by peopleshe met "out." He hadn't in fine reckoned that she would still havesomething fresh for him; yet this was what she had--that on the top ofa tram in the Borough he felt as if he were next her at dinner. What aperson she would be if they _had_ been rich--with what a genius for theso-called great life, what a presence for the so-called great house,what a grace for the so-called great positions! He might regret atonce, while he was about it, that they weren't princes or billionaires.She had treated him on their Christmas to a softness that had struckhim at the time as of the quality of fine velvet, meant to fold thick,but stretched a little thin; at present, however, she gave him theimpression of a contact multitudinous as only the superficial can be.She had throughout never a word for what went on at home. She came outof that and she returned to it, but her nearest reference was the lookwith which, each time, she bade him good-bye. The look was her repeatedprohibition: "It's what I _have_ to see and to know--so don't touch it.That but wakes up the old evil, which I keep still, in my way, bysitting by it. I go now--leave me alone!--to sit by it again. The wayto pity me--if that's what you want--is to believe in me. If we couldreally _do_ anything it would be another matter."

  He watched her, when she went her way, with the vision of what she thusa little stiffly carried. It was confused and obscure, but how, withher head high, it made her hold herself! He really in his own personmight at these moments have been swaying a little aloft as one of theobjects in her poised basket. It was doubtless thanks to some suchconsciousness as this that he felt the lapse of the weeks, before theday of Kate's mounting of his stair, almost swingingly rapid. Theycontained for him the contradiction that, whereas periods of waitingare supposed in general to keep the time slow, it was the wait,actually, that made the pace trouble him. The secret of that anomaly,to be plain, was that he was aware of how, while the days melted,something rare went with them. This something was only a thought, but athought precisely of such freshness and such delicacy as made theprecious, of whatever sort, most subject to the hunger of time. Thethought was all his own, and his intimate companion was the last personhe might have shared it with. He kept it back like a favourite pang;left it behind him, so to say, when he went out, but came home againthe sooner for the certainty of finding it there. Then he took it outof its sacred corner and its soft wrappings; he undid them one by one,handling them, handling _it_, as a father, baffled and tender, mighthandle a maimed child. But so it was before him--in his dread of whoelse might see it. Then he took to himself at such hours, in otherwords, that he should never, never know what had been in Milly'sletter. The intention announced in it he should but too probably know;only that would have been, but for the depths of his spirit, the leastpart of it. The part of it missed for ever was the turn she would havegiven her act. This turn had possibilities that, somehow, by wonderingabout them, his imagination had extraordinarily filled out and refined.It had made of them a revelation the loss of which was like the sightof a priceless pearl cast before his eyes--his pledge given not to saveit--into the fathomless sea, or rather even it was like the sacrificeof something sentient and throbbing, something that, f
or the spiritualear, might have been audible as a faint far wail. This was the sound hecherished when alone in the stillness of his rooms. He sought andguarded the stillness, so that it might prevail there till theinevitable sounds of life, once more, comparatively coarse and harsh,should smother and deaden it--doubtless by the same process with whichthey would officiously heal the ache in his soul that was somehow onewith it. It moreover deepened the sacred hush that he couldn'tcomplain. He had given poor Kate her freedom.

  The great and obvious thing, as soon as she stood there on the occasionwe have already named, was that she was now in high possession of it.This would have marked immediately the difference--had there beennothing else to do it--between their actual terms and their otherterms, the character of their last encounter in Venice. That had been_his_ idea, whereas her present step was her own; the few marks theyhad in common were, from the first moment, to his conscious vision,almost pathetically plain. She was as grave now as before; she lookedaround her, to hide it, as before; she pretended, as before, in an airin which her words at the moment itself fell flat, to an interest inthe place and a curiosity about his "things"; there was a recall in theway in which, after she had failed a little to push up her veilsymmetrically and he had said she had better take it off altogether,she had acceded to his suggestion before the glass. It was just thesethings that were vain; and what was real was that his fancy figured herafter the first few minutes as literally now providing the element ofreassurance which had previously been his care. It was she, supremely,who had the presence of mind. She made indeed for that matter veryprompt use of it. "You see I've not hesitated this time to break yourseal."

  She had laid on the table from the moment of her coming in the longenvelope, substantially filled, which he had sent her enclosed inanother of still ampler make. He had however not looked at it--hisbelief being that he wished never again to do so; besides which it hadhappened to rest with its addressed side up. So he "saw" nothing, andit was only into her eyes that her remark made him look, declining anyapproach to the object indicated. "It's not 'my' seal, my dear; and myintention--which my note tried to express--was all to treat it to youas not mine."

  "Do you mean that it's to that extent mine then?"

  "Well, let us call it, if we like, theirs--that of the good people inNew York, the authors of our communication. If the seal is broken welland good; but we _might_, you know," he presently added, "have sent itback to them intact and inviolate. Only accompanied," he smiled withhis heart in his mouth, "by an absolutely kind letter."

  Kate took it with the mere brave blink with which a patient of couragesignifies to the exploring medical hand that the tender place istouched. He saw on the spot that she was prepared, and with this signalsign that she was too intelligent not to be, came a flicker ofpossibilities. She was--merely to put it at that--intelligent enoughfor anything. "Is it what you're proposing we _should_ do?"

  "Ah it's too late to do it--well, ideally. Now, with that sign that we_know_--!"

  "But you don't know," she said very gently.

  "I refer," he went on without noticing it, "to what would have been thehandsome way. Its being dispatched again, with no cognisance taken butone's assurance of the highest consideration, and the proof of this inthe state of the envelope--_that_ would have been really satisfying."

  She thought an instant. "The state of the envelope proving refusal, youmean, not to be based on the insufficiency of the sum?"

  Densher smiled again as for the play, however whimsical, of her humour."Well yes--something of that sort."

  "So that if cognisance _has_ been taken--so far as I'm concerned--itspoils the beauty?"

  "It makes the difference that I'm disappointed in the hope--which Iconfess I entertained--that you'd bring the thing back to me as you hadreceived it."

  "You didn't express that hope in your letter."

  "I didn't want to. I wanted to leave it to yourself. I wanted--oh yes,if that's what you wish to ask me--to see what you'd do."

  "You wanted to measure the possibilities of my departure from delicacy?"

  He continued steady now; a kind of ease--from the presence, as in theair, of something he couldn't yet have named--had come to him. "Well, Iwanted--in so good a case--to test you."

  She was struck--it showed in her face--by his expression. "It _is_ agood case. I doubt whether a better," she said with her eyes on him,"has ever been known."

  "The better the case then the better the test!"

  "How do you know," she asked in reply to this, "what I'm capable of?"

  "I don't, my dear! Only with the seal unbroken I should have knownsooner."

  "I see"--she took it in. "But I myself shouldn't have known at all. Andyou wouldn't have known, either, what I do know."

  "Let me tell you at once," he returned, "that if you've been moved tocorrect my ignorance I very particularly request you not to."

  She just hesitated. "Are you afraid of the effect of the corrections?Can you only do it by doing it blindly?"

  He waited a moment. "What is it that you speak of my doing?"

  "Why the only thing in the world that I take you as thinking of. Notaccepting--what she has done. Isn't there some regular name in suchcases? Not taking up the bequest."

  "There's something you forget in it," he said after a moment. "Myasking you to join with me in doing so."

  Her wonder but made her softer, yet at the same time didn't make herless firm. "How can I 'join' in a matter with which I've nothing to do?"

  "How? By a single word."

  "And what word?"

  "Your consent to my giving up."

  "My consent has no meaning when I can't prevent you."

  "You can perfectly prevent me. Understand that well," he said.

  She seemed to face a threat in it. "You mean you won't give up if I_don't_ consent?"

  "Yes. I do nothing."

  "That, as I understand, is accepting."

  Densher paused. "I do nothing formal."

  "You won't, I suppose you mean, touch the money."

  "I won't touch the money."

  It had a sound--though he had been coming to it--that made for gravity."Who then in such an event _will?_"

  "Any one who wants or who can."

  Again a little she said nothing: she might say too much. But by thetime she spoke he had covered ground. "How can I touch it but _through_you?"

  "You can't. Any more," he added, "than I can renounce it except throughyou."

  "Oh ever so much less! There's nothing," she explained, "in my power."

  "I'm in your power," Merton Densher said.

  "In what way?"

  "In the way I show--and the way I've always shown. When have I shown,"he asked as with a sudden cold impatience, "anything else? You surelymust feel--so that you needn't wish to appear to spare me in it--howyou 'have' me."

  "It's very good of you, my dear," she nervously laughed, "to put me sothoroughly up to it!"

  "I put you up to nothing. I didn't even put you up to the chance that,as I said a few moments ago, I saw for you in forwarding that thing.Your liberty is therefore in every way complete."

  It had come to the point really that they showed each other pale faces,and that all the unspoken between them looked out of their eyes in adim terror of their further conflict. Something even rose between themin one of their short silences--something that was like an appeal fromeach to the other not to be too true. Their necessity was somehowbefore them, but which of them must meet it first? "Thank you!" Katesaid for his word about her freedom, but taking for the minute nofurther action on it. It was blest at least that all ironies failedthem, and during another slow moment their very sense of it cleared theair.

  There was an effect of this in the way he soon went on. "You mustintensely feel that it's the thing for which we worked together."

  She took up the remark, however, no more than if it were commonplace;she was already again occupied with a point of her own. "Is itabsolutely true--for if it is, yo
u know, it's tremendouslyinteresting--that you haven't so much as a curiosity about what she hasdone for you?"

  "Would you like," he asked, "my formal oath on it?"

  "No--but I don't understand. It seems to me in your place--!"

  "Ah," he couldn't help breaking in, "what do you know of my place?Pardon me," he at once added; "my preference is the one I express."

  She had in an instant nevertheless a curious thought. "But won't thefacts be published?"

  "'Published'?"--he winced.

  "I mean won't you see them in the papers?"

  "Ah never! I shall know how to escape that."

  It seemed to settle the subject, but she had the next minute anotherinsistence. "Your desire is to escape everything?"

  "Everything."

  "And do you need no more definite sense of what it is you ask me tohelp you to renounce?"

  "My sense is sufficient without being definite. I'm willing to believethat the amount of money's not small."

  "Ah there you are!" she exclaimed.

  "If she was to leave me a remembrance," he quietly pursued, "it wouldinevitably not be meagre."

  Kate waited as for how to say it. "It's worthy of her. It's what shewas herself--if you remember what we once said _that_ was."

  He hesitated--as if there had been many things. But he remembered oneof them. "Stupendous?"

  "Stupendous." A faint smile for it--ever so small--had flickered in herface, but had vanished before the omen of tears, a little lessuncertain, had shown themselves in his own. His eyes filled--but thatmade her continue. She continued gently. "I think that what it reallyis must be that you're afraid. I mean," she explained, "that you'reafraid of _all_ the truth. If you're in love with her without it, whatindeed can you be more? And you're afraid--it's wonderful!--to be inlove with her."

  "I never was in love with her," said Densher.

  She took it, but after a little she met it. "I believe that now--forthe time she lived. I believe it at least for the time you were there.But your change came--as it might well--the day you last saw her; shedied for you then that you might understand her. From that hour you_did_." With which Kate slowly rose. "And I do now. She did it _for_us." Densher rose to face her, and she went on with her thought. "Iused to call her, in my stupidity--for want of anything better--a dove.Well she stretched out her wings, and it was to _that_ they reached.They cover us."

  "They cover us," Densher said.

  "That's what I give you," Kate gravely wound up. "That's what I've donefor you."

  His look at her had a slow strangeness that had dried, on the moment,his tears. "Do I understand then--?"

  "That I do consent?" She gravely shook her head. "No--for I see. You'llmarry me without the money; you won't marry me with it. If I don'tconsent _you_ don't."

  "You lose me?" He showed, though naming it frankly, a sort of awe ofher high grasp. "Well, you lose nothing else. I make over to you everypenny."

  Prompt was his own clearness, but she had no smile this time to spare."Precisely--so that I must choose."

  "You must choose."

  Strange it was for him then that she stood in his own rooms doing it,while, with an intensity now beyond any that had ever made his breathcome slow, he waited for her act. "There's but one thing that can saveyou from my choice."

  "From your choice of my surrender to you?"

  "Yes"--and she gave a nod at the long envelope on the table--"yoursurrender of that."

  "What is it then?"

  "Your word of honour that you're not in love with her memory."

  "Oh--her memory!"

  "Ah"--she made a high gesture--"don't speak of it as if you couldn'tbe. I could in your place; and you're one for whom it will do. Hermemory's your love. You _want_ no other."

  He heard her out in stillness, watching her face but not moving. Thenhe only said: "I'll marry you, mind you, in an hour."

  "As we were?"

  "As we were."

  But she turned to the door, and her headshake was now the end. "Weshall never be again as we were!"

  THE END

  The Riverside Press

  CAMBRIDGE . MASSACHUSETTS

  U . S . A

 
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