 They came to it almost immediately. He was to wander afterwards at the funus 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. Densha had, in the instant flair of his eagerness, his curiosity, all responsive at sight of her, waved away on the spot of the padrona who had offered to relieve her of her macintosh. She looked vaguely about through her wet veil, intensely alive now to the steps she had taken, and wishing it not to have been in the dark, but clearly as yet seeing nothing. I don't know 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 me feel 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 for him like a complaint, and before something he already made out in his visitor he knew his own trouble is small. Hers under her damp draperies, which shamed his lack of a fire, was great, and he felt she had brought it all with her. He answered that he had been patient, and above all that he had been still. As still as a mouse you'll have seen it for yourself, still for three days together than I've ever been in my life, it has seemed to me the only thing. This qualification of it as a policy or a remedy was straight away for his friend he saw a light that her own light could answer. It has been 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 a head shake which, though slow, was deeply mature, you don'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 was taking from him—his presence, his face, his voice, the old rooms themselves, so meager yet so charged, where Kate had admirably been to him. These things counted for her, now she had them, as the help she had been wanting, so that she still only stood there taking them all in. With it, however, popped up characteristically a throb of her conscience. What she thus tasted was almost a personal joy. It told Densha of the three days she on her side had spent. Well, anything you 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 he expressed. Then you know? Is she dying, he asked, for all answer? Mrs. Stringham waited, her face seemed to sound him, then her own reply was 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 by the faintest illusion. Oh! said Densha 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 Shepard, with a drop of her arms on her waterproof. 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, none but the life Kate had left, the sense of which, for that matter, by mystic channels might fairly be reaching the visitor, the very impotence of their extinction. And Densha had nothing to oppose it with all, nothing but, again, is she dying? It made her, however, as if these were crudities, almost material pangs, only sayers before, then you know. Yes, he at last returned, I know, but the marvel to me is that you do, I have no right, in fact, to imagine or to assume that you do. You may, said Susan Shepard, 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 it affected him, he brought out in a groan a doubting, oh, oh! It turned him 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 in possession, the fact now a thick association for which he had hired it. That was not for telling, but Susan Shepard was, none the less, so decidedly wonderful, that the sense of it might really have begun by an effect already operating, to be a part of her knowledge. He saw, and it stirred him, that she hadn't come to judge him, had come rather so far as she might dare, to pity. This showed him her own abasement, that at any rate of grief, and made him feel with a rush of friendliness that he liked to be with her, the rush had quickened when 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 ventured to feel, it's much. She replied in effect silently, that it was whatever he liked, on which, so far as he had been afraid for anything, he knew his fear had dropped. The comfort was huge, for it gave back to him something precious, over which, in the effort of recovery, his own hand had too imperfectly closed. Kate, he remembered, had said to him, with her soul and single boldness, and also on grounds he hadn't then measured, 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 in which Kate was always showing. You don't think then very horribly of me. And her answer was the more valuable that it came without nervous effusion, quite as if she understood what he might conceivably have believed. She turned over in fact what she thought, and that was what helped 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 recognized in her personal ravage that the words she had just uttered to him were the one flower she had to throw. They were all her consolation for him, and the consolation even still depended on the event. She sat with him at any rate in the gray clearance, as sad as a winter dawn made by their meeting. The image she again evoked for him loomed in it but the larger. 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? I don't mean not of me. Of nothing, of no one. And she went on, Susan Shepard, giving it out as she had had to take it. She doesn't want to die. Think of her age. Think of her goodness. Think of her beauty. Think of all she is. Think of all she has. She lies there stiffening herself and clinging to it all. So I thank God, the poor lady wound up with a one in consequence. 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. So you see all these days. I can't tell you, but it's better so. It would kill me if she were to tell me. To tell you, he was still a to-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 a long pause, and they might have been thinking together of what they could even now do to prevent it. This, however, was not what he brought out. Millie's grimness and the great hushed palace were present to him, present with the little woman before him, as she must have been waiting there and listening. Only what harm have you done her? Mrs. Stringham looked about in her darkness. I don't know. I came and talked 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 he could 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 him some 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't see 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 in him a heat. But the doctor, all the while—Takini, oh, he's kind. He comes. He's proud of having been approved and coached by a great London man. He hardly, in fact, goes away, so that I scarce know what becomes of his other patients. He thinks her justly enough a great personage. He treats her like royalty. He's waiting on events. But she is barely consented to see him, and though she has told him generously, for she thinks of me, dear creature, that he may come, that he may stay, for my sake, he spends most of his time only hovering at her door, prowling through the rooms, trying to entertain me in that ghastly saloon with the gossip of Venice, and meeting me in doorways in the Sala on the staircase with an agreeable, intolerable smile. We don't, said Susan Shepherd, talk of her. By her request? Absolutely. I don't do what she doesn't wish. We talk of the price of provisions. By her request, too? Absolutely. She named it to me as a subject when she said, the first time, that if it would be any comfort to me, he might stay as much as we liked. Densher took it all in. But he isn't any comfort to you. None whatever. That, however, she added, isn't his fault. Nothing is any 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, I'll call it that. But she looked at him a moment with eyes filled full, and something came up in her the next instant from deeper still. I came at bottom, of course. You came at bottom, of course, for our friend herself. But if it's, as you say, too late for me to do anything. She continued to look at him, and with an irritation which he saw grow in her from the truth itself. So I did say, but with you here—and she turned her vision again, strangely about her—with you here and with 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 she won'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. I shouldn't like it only to see her as you make me. I should like it if I could help her. But even then, Densha pursued without faith, she would have to want it first herself. And there, he continued to make out, 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 he helplessly moved. There's one thing you can do. There's only that, and even for that there are difficulties. But there is that. He stood before her with his hands in his pocket, and he had soon enough from her eyes seen what was coming. She paused as if waiting for his leave to utter it, and as he only let her wait they heard in the silence on the 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 really know yourself what it is. He did know what it was, and with it even, as she said, rather, there were 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 house's opposite, blurred, and belittled stood at twice their distance. Mrs. Stringham said nothing, was as mute in fact for the minute as if she had had him, and he was the first again to speak. When he did so, however, it was not in straight answer to her last remark. He only started from that. He said as he came back to her, Let me, you know, see. One must understand, almost as if he had for the time accepted it, and what he wished to understand was where, on the essence of the question, was the voice of Sir Luke Stratt. If they talked of not giving her up, shouldn't he be the one least of all to do it? Aren't we, at the worst, in the dark without him? Oh! said Mrs. Stringham. It's he who has kept me going. I wired the first night, and he answered like an angel. He'll come like one, only he 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 in October, that night when she was in white, when she had people there, and those musicians, she committed him to my care. It was beautiful for both of us. She put us in relation. She asked me for the time to take him about. I did so, and we quite hit it off. That proved, denture said with a quick sad smile, that she liked him. He liked you, Susan Shepard presently risked. Ah! I know nothing about that. You ought to, then. He went with you to galleries and churches, you saved his time for him, showed him the choicest things, and you perhaps will remember telling me myself that if he hadn't been a great surgeon, he 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 in her, 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 she saw him on this, as her eyes sufficiently betrayed, trying to keep his distance from the recognition he had a few moments before partly confess to. I'm glad she dropped you like him. There was something for him in the sound of it. Well, I do know more, dear lady, than you do yourself. Surely you like him. Surely when he was 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. Denchers stopped short, though at first without a word. We never spoke of her, neither of us mentioned her, even to sound her name, and nothing whatever in connection with her past between us. Mrs. Stringham stared up at him, surprised at this picture, but she had plainly an idea that after an instant resisted it. That was his professional propriety. Precisely, but it was also my sense of that virtue in him, and it was something more besides, and he spoke with sudden intensity. I couldn't talk to him about her. Oh! said Susan Shepard. 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, had waited on her words, and it kept him for honesty looking at her. For honesty, too, that is, for his own words, he had quickly coloured. He was sinking so at a stroke the burden of his discourse with Kate. His visitor, for the minute while their eyes met, might have been watching him 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 his statement, but he really modified it. Sir Luke, at all events, had nothing to tell me, and I had nothing to tell him. Make-believe talk was impossible for us, and—and real, she had taken him right up with a huge emphasis, was more impossible still. No doubt he didn't deny it, and she had straight away drawn her conclusion. Then that proves what I say, that there were immensities between you, otherwise you'd have chatted. I dare say, denture granted, we were both thinking of her. You were neither of you thinking of anyone else, that's why you kept together. Well, that too, if she desired, he took from her, but he came straight back 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 into which he had already observed that her special shade of earnestness was perpetually flowering right and left. Are you very sure? And he could 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 and more, for the last five minutes, had he known she had brought something with her, and never in respect to anything had he had such a wish to postpone. He would have liked to put everything off till Thursday. He was sorry it was now Tuesday. He wondered if he were afraid. Yet it wasn't of Sir Luke who was coming, nor of Millie who was dying, nor of Mrs. Stringham who was sitting there. It wasn't strange to say of Kate either, for Kate's presence affected him suddenly as having swooned or trembled away. Susan Shepards, thus prolonged, had cast on it some influence under which it had ceased to act. She was as absent to his sensibility as she had constantly been since her departure absent, as an echo or a reference from the palace. And it was the first time among the objects now surrounding him that his sensibility so 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 me to see you. She slowly rose at the words which might almost have conveyed to her the hint of his taking care. She stood there as if she had in fact seen him abruptly move to dismiss her. But the abruptness would have been in this case so marked as fairly to offer ground for insistence to her imagination of his state. It would take her more over. 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? I mean if Sir Luke himself puts it to you, and will you give him—oh, she was 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 quarter of 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 of his fear. It showed him sharply enough of what he was afraid. If I deny what to her? Hesitation on the demand revived in her, for hadn't he all along been letting 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 suddenly perverse. I've been judging that you yourself know, and it was she who 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 said, why, it's what has done it. Yes, I understand that, but you also know—he had faulted again, but all she knew she now wanted to say. I'm speaking, she said soothingly, of what he told her. It's that that I'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 of relief, as if he had supposed her thinking of something else. Thereupon, straight away, that lightened it. Oh, you thought I've known it for true? Her light had heightened her flesh, and he saw that he had betrayed himself. Not, however, that it mattered, as he immediately saw still better. There it was now, all of it at last, and this at least, there was no postponing. They were left with her idea, the one she was wishing to make him recognize. He had expressed ten minutes before his need to understand, and she was acting after all but on that. Only what he was to understand was no small matter. It might be larger even than as yet appeared. He took again one of his turns, not meeting what she had last said. He mooned a minute, as he would have called it, at a window, and of course she 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 became as promptly a scruple, which she spoke as if not to press. What I mean is 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 that came into his head. All what while? Oh, it's not I who say it, she spoke in gentleness. I only repeat to you what he told her. Densher from whom an impatience had escaped had already caught himself up. Pardon my brutality. Of course, I know what you're talking about. I saw him toward the evening, he further explained, in the piazza. Only just saw him through the glass at Florians, without any words. 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 he wouldn't have come for nothing, and I turned it over what he would have come for. Also had Mrs. Stringham. He came for exasperation. Densher approved. He came to let her know that he knows better than she for whom it was she had a couple of months before in her fool's paradise 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 his blow, and she took it without a sign. Mrs. Stringham, it was plain, spoke by book, and it brought in to play again her appreciation of what she 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 in it they looked at each other, yet he's thought so awfully clever. So awfully, it's more loud as own view, and he was nice in London, said Mrs. Stringham, to me, one could almost pity him. He has had such a good conscience. That's exactly the inevitable ass. Yes, but it wasn't. I could see from the only few things she first told me, that he meant her the least harm. He intended none whatever. That's always the ass at his worst, Densher returned. He only, of course, meant harm to me. And good to himself, he thought that would come. He had been unable to swallow, Mrs. Stringham pursued, what had happened on his other visit. 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 he was turned away. Perfectly, Densher said, I filled it out, and also that he is known meanwhile for what I was then received, for a stay of all these weeks 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. Only after all, how has he happened to know, that is, to know enough? What do you call enough, Mrs. Stringham inquired. He can only have acted, it would have been his soul's safety, from full knowledge. He had gone on without heeding her question, but face to face as they were, something had nonetheless passed between them. It was this that after an instant made her again interrogate. What do you mean by 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 reasoned to believe 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 make himself possibly right with her, a different attempt from the other. He had at any rate something to tell her, and he didn't know his opportunity would reduce itself to half an hour. Or perhaps indeed half an hour would be just what was most effective. It has been, said Susan Shepard. Her companion took it in, understanding but too well, yet as she lighted the matter for him more, really than his own courage had quite dared, putting the absent dots on several eyes, he saw a new question swarm. They had been till now in a bunch, entangled and confused, and they fell apart, each showing for itself. The first he put to her was at any rate abrupt. Have you heard of late from Mrs. Lauder? Oh yes, two or three times. She depends naturally upon news of Millie. 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 have been 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. Lauder 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 to Miss Croy that she thought Kate was thinking of him, or perhaps I should say rather that he was thinking of her, only it seemed this time to have struck more that he was seeing the way more open to him. Densher listened with his eyes on the ground, but he presently raised them to speak, and there was that in his face which proved him aware of a 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 seem to trouble 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 piece it too. It was one of the things in her, and his conscious face took it from her as such, that from the moment of her coming in had seemed to mark for him as to what concerned him the long jump of her perception. They had parted four days earlier with many things between them deep down. But these things were now on their troubled surface, and it wasn't he who had brought them so quickly up. Women were wonderful, at least this one was, but so not less was Millie, was Aunt Maude, so most of all was his very Kate. While he already knew what he had been feeling 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 his putting to his visitor a question that quite passed over her remark. Has Miss Crow, meanwhile, written to our friend? Oh! Mrs. Stringham amended, her friend also, for not a single word that I know of. He had taken it for certain she hadn't, the thing being, after all, but a shade more strange than his having himself with Millie never for six weeks mentioned the young lady in question. It was for that matter, but a shade more strange than Millie's not having mentioned her, in spite of which, and however inconsequently, he blushed anew for Kate's silence. He got away from it, in fact, as quickly as possible, and the furthest he could get was by reverting for a minute the man they had been judging. How did he manage to get at her? She had only, with what had passed between them before, to say she couldn't see him. Oh! she was disposed to kindness. She was easier, the good lady explained, 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, she could afford to be the opposite, with which, as he said nothing, she just impatiently completed her sense. She had had you here for six weeks. Oh! Dencher softly groaned. Besides, I think he must have written her first, written, I mean, in a tone to smooth his way, that it would be a kindness to himself, then on the spot. On the spot, Dencher broke in, he unmasked the horrid little beast. It made Susan Shepherd turn slightly pale, though quickening, as for hope, the intensity of her look at him. Oh! he went off without an alarm, 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 the bargain, the young man asked. Didn't he, weeks before, see her, judge her, feel her, as having for such a suit as his, not more perhaps than a few months to live? Mrs. Stringham at first, for a reply, but looked at him in silence, and it gave more force to what she then remarkably added. He has doubtless been 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 Dencher brought out, he moved off, however, with a hot face, as soon as he had spoken, conscious again of an intention in his visitor's reserve. Dusk was now deeper, and after he had once more taken 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 a thought. He will have proposed to Miss Croy, that's what has happened. Her reserve continued. It's you who must judge. While I do judge, Mrs. Lauder will have done so too, only she, poor lady, wrong. Miss Croy's refusal of him will have struck him, Dencher continued 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 fact to make his dissent on Miss Thiel relevant. But clear enough, he has believed, said Dencher bravely, that I may have been a reason at Lancaster Gate, and yet at the same time have been up to something in Venice. Mrs. Stringham took her courage from his own, up to something, up to what? God knows, to some game, as they say, to some devil-tree, to some duplicity. Which, of course, Mrs. Stringham observed, is a monstrous supposition. Her companion, after a stiff minute, sensibly long for each, 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 it even seemed to state for his own ears that no answer was possible. She left him to himself, and he was glad she had declined for their further colloquy, the advantage of lights. These would have been an advantage mainly to herself, yet she got her benefit to you even from the absence of them. It came out in her very tone when at last she addressed him, so differently, for confidence, in words she had already used. 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 so dreadfully to believe? Oh, how he knew he hung back! But at last he said, You are absolutely certain, 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 a little that her answer must be a pain to her discretion. She answered none the less, and he was truly the harder pressed. What I believe will inevitably depend more or less on your action. You can perfectly settle 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, can found the whole thing, don't you see, of exactly what? It was 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. THE NEAR THURSDAY Coming nearer and bringing Sir Luke's stret, brought also blessedly in abatement of other rigours. The weather changed, the stubborn storm yielded, and the autumn sunshine baffled for many days, but now hot and almost vindictive, came into its own again, and with an almost audible pain, a suffusion of bright sound that was one with the bright colour, took large possession. Venice glowed, and plashed, and called, and chimed again. The air was like a clap of hands, and the scattered pinks, yellows, blues, sea-greens, were like a hanging out of vivid stuffs, a laying down of fine carpets. Densher rejoiced in this, on the occasion of his going to the station to meet the great doctor. He went after consideration, which, as he was constantly aware, was at present his imposed, his only way of doing anything. That was where the event had landed him, when no event in his life had landed him before. He had thought, no doubt, from the day he was born, much more than he had acted, except indeed that he remembered thoughts, a few of them, which at the moment of their coming to him had thrilled him almost like adventures, but anything like his actual state he had not, as to the prohibition of impulse, accident, range, the prohibition, in other words, of freedom, hid the two known. The great oddity was that if he had felt his arrival, so few weeks back, especially as an adventure, nothing could now less resemble one than the fact of his staying. It would be an adventure to break away, to depart, to go back above all to London, and tell Cape Croy he had done so. But there was something of the merely, the almost meanly, obliged and involved sort in his going on as he was. That was the effect in particular of Mrs. Stringham's visit, which had left him as with such taste in his mouth of what he couldn't do. It had made this quantity clear to him, and yet had 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 the station for Sir Luke. Nothing equally free at all events had he yet turned over so long. What then was his odious position, but that again and again he was afraid. He stiffened himself under this consciousness, as if it had been a tax levied by a tyrant. He hadn't at any time proposed to himself to live long enough for fear to preponderate in his life. Such was simply the advantage it had actually got of him. He was afraid, for instance, that an advance to his distinguished friend might prove for him somehow a pledge or a committal. He was afraid of it as a current that would draw him too far, yet he thought with an equal aversion of being shabby, being poor, through fear. What finally prevailed with him was the reflection that whatever might happen, the great man had, after that occasion at the palace, their young woman's brief sacrifice to society, and the hour of Mrs. Stringham's appeal had brought it well to the surface, shown him marked benevolence. Mrs. Stringham's comments on the relation in which Millie had placed them made him, it was unmistakable, feel things he perhaps hadn't felt. It was in the spirit of seeking a chance to feel again adequately whatever it was he had missed. It was no doubt in that spirit, so far as it went astray for freedom, that denture, arriving betimes, paced the platform before the train came in. Only after it had come, and he had presented himself at the door of Sir Luke's compartment with everything that followed, only as the situation developed, the sense of an anticlimax to so many intensities deprived his apprehensions and hesitations even of the scant dignity they might claim. He could scarce have said if the visitor's manner less showed the remembrance that might have suggested expectation, or made sure to work of surprise in presence of the fact. Sir Luke had clean forgotten, so denture read, the rather remarkable young man he had formally gone about with, though he picked him up again on the spot with one large quiet look. The young man felt himself so picked, and the thing immediately affected him as the proof of a splendid economy. Opposed to all the waste with which he was now connected, the exhibition was of a nature quite nobly to admonish him. The eminent pilgrim in the train all the way had used the hours as he needed, thinking not a moment in advance of what finally awaited him. An exquisite case awaited him, of which, in this queer way, the remarkable young man was an outlying part, but the single motion of his face, the motion into which denture, from the platform, lightly stirred its stillness, was his first renewed cognition. If, however, he had suppressed the matter by leaving Victoria, he would at once suppress now, in turn, whatever else suited. The perception of this became as a symbol of the whole pitch, so far as one might oneself be concerned of his visit. One saw our friend further meditated everything that in contact he appeared to accept, if only for much not trouble to sink it, what one missed was the inward use he made of it. Denture began wondering, at the great water steps outside, what use he would make of the anomaly of their having there to separate. Eugenio had been on the platform in the respectful rear, and the gondola from the palace, under his direction, bestowed itself with its attaching mixture of alacrity and dignity on their coming out of the station together. Denture didn't at all mind now that, he himself of necessity refusing a seat on the deep black cushions beside the guest of the palace, he had Milly's three emissaries for spectators, and this susceptibility he also knew it was something to have left behind. All he 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 sad head shake, go there now. Oh! Sir Luke Stret returned, and made no more of it, so that the thing was splendid, Denture fairly thought, as an inscrutability quite inevitable and unconscious. His friend appeared not even to make of it that he supposed it might be for respect to the crisis. He didn't, moreover, afterwards make much more of anything, after the classic craft, that is, obeying in the main Pascal's inimitable stroke from the poop, had performed the manoeuvre by which it presented, receding a back, so to speak, rendered positively graceful by the high black hump of its bells. Denture watched the gondola out of sight, he heard Pascal's cry, borne to him across the water, for the sharp firm swerve into a side canal, a shortcut to the palace. He had no gondola of his own, it was his habit never to take one, and he humbly, as in Venice it is humble, walked away, though not without having for some time longer stood as if fixed where the guest of the palace had left him. It was strange enough, but he found himself as never yet, and as he couldn't have reckoned, in presence of the truth that was the truest about Milly, he couldn't have reckoned on the force of the difference instantly made, but it was all in the air as he heard Pascal's cry and saw the boat disappear, by the mere visibility on the spot of the personage summoned to her aid. He hadn't only never been near the facts of her condition, which counted so as a blessing for him, he hadn't only with all the world hovered outside an impenetrable ring fence, within which there reigned a kind of expensive vagueness made up of smiles and silences, and beautiful fictions and priceless arrangements all strained to breaking, but he had also with everyone else, as he now felt, actively fostered suppressions which were in the direct interest of everyone's good manner, everyone's pity, everyone's really quite generous ideal. It was a conspiracy of silence as the cliche went to which no one had made an exception, the great smudge of mortality across the picture, the shadow of pain and horror, finding in no quarter a surface of spirit or of speech that consented to reflect it. The mere aesthetic instinct of mankind, a young man had more than once in the connection said to himself, letting the rest of the proposition drop, but touching again thus sufficiently on the outrage even to taste involved in one's having to see. So then it had been a general conscious fool's paradise, from which the specified had been chased like a dangerous animal. What therefore had at present befallen was that the specified, standing all the while at the gate, had now crossed the threshold as in Sir Luke Stratt's person, and quite on such a scale as to fill out the whole precinct. Dencher's nerves absolutely his heartbeats too had measured the change before he on this occasion moved away. The facts of physical suffering, of incurable pain, of the chance grimly narrowed, had been made at a stroke, intense, and this was to be 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 to be thankful for was the breadth of Sir Luke's shoulders, which should one be able to keep in line with them, might in some degree interpose. It was, however, far from playing to Dencher for the first day or two that he was again to see his distinguished friend at all, that he couldn't on any basis actually serving return to the palace. This was as solid to him every wit as the other feature of his case, the fact of the publicity attaching to his prescription through his not having taken himself off. He had been seen often enough in the Leporelli gondola, as accordingly he was not on any presumption destined to meet Sir Luke about the town, where the latter would have neither time nor taste to lounge. Nothing more would occur between them unless the great man should surprisingly wait upon him. His doing that, Dencher further reflected, wouldn't even simply depend on Mrs. Stringham's having decided to, as they might say, turn him on. It would depend as well, for there would be practically some difference to her on her actually attempting it, and it would depend above all on what Sir Luke would make of such an overture. Dencher had for that matter his own view of the amount to say nothing of the particular sort of response it might expect from him. He had his own view of the ability of such a personage even to understand such an appeal. To what extent could he be prepared, and what importance in fine could he attach? Dencher asked himself these questions, in truth, to put his own position at the worst. He should miss the great man completely unless the great man should come to see him, and the great man could only come to see him for a purpose unsupposable. Therefore he wouldn't come at all, and consequently there was nothing to hope. It wasn't in the least that Dencher invoked this violence to all probability, but it pressed on him that there were few possible diversions he could afford now to miss. Nothing in his predicament was so odd as that incontestably afraid of himself, he was not afraid of Sir Luke. He had an impression which he clung to based on a previous taste of the visitor's company that he would somehow let him off. The truth about Millie perched on his shoulders and sounded in his tread became by the fact of his presence the name and the form for the time of everything in the place, but it didn't for the difference sit in his face, the face so squarely and easily turned to Dencher at the earlier season. His presence on the first occasion, not as the result of a summons, but as a friendly whim of his own, had had quite another value, and though our young man could scarce regard that value as recoverable, he yet reached out in imagination to a renewal of the old contact. He didn't propose as he privately and forcibly phrased the matter to be a hog, but there was something he after all did want for himself. It was something this stuck to him that Sir Luke would have had for him if it hadn't been impossible. These were his worst days, the two or three, those on which even the sense of the tension at the palace didn't much help him not to feel that his destiny made but light of him. He had never been, as he judged it, so down. In mean conditions, without books, without society, almost without money, he had nothing to do but to wait. His main support really was his original idea, which didn't leave him, of waiting for the deepest depth his predicament could sink him to. Fate would invent if he but gave it time at some refinement of the horrible. It was just inventing, meanwhile, this suppression of Sir Luke. When the third day came without a sign, he knew what to think. He had given Mrs. Stringham during her call on him no such answer as would have armed her faith, and the ultimatum she had described as ready for him when he should be ready, was therefore, if on no other ground than her want of this power to answer for him, not to be presented. The presentation Hevard knew was not what he desired. That was not either, we hasten to declare, as denture then soon enough saw, the idea with which Sir Luke finally stood before him again. For stand before him again he finally did, just when our friend had gloomily embraced the belief that the limit of his power to absent himself from London obligations would have been reached. Four or five days exclusive of journeys represented the largest supposable sacrifice to a head not crowned, on the part of one of the highest medical lights in the world, so that really when the personage in question, following up a tinkle of the bell, solidly rose in the doorway, it was to impose on denture a vision that for the instant cut like a knife. It spoke the fact, and in a single dreadful word, of the magnitude he shrank from calling it anything else, of Milly's case. The great man had not gone then, and an immense surrender to her immense need was so expressed in it that some effect, some help, some hope, were flagrantly part of the expression. It was for denture, with his reaction from disappointment, as if he were conscious of ten things at once, the foremost being that just conceivably, since Sir Luke was still there, she had been saved. Close upon its heels, however, and quite as sharply, came the sense that the crisis, plainly even now to be prolonged for him, was to have none of that sound simplicity. Not only had his visitor not dropped into gossip about Milly, he hadn't dropped in to mention her at all. He had dropped in fairly to show that during the brief remainder of his stay, the end of which was now in sight, as little as possible of that was to be looked for. The demonstration, such as it was, was in the key of their previous acquaintance, and it was their previous acquaintance that had made him come. He was not to stop longer than the Saturday next at hand, but there were things of interest he should like to see again, meanwhile. It was for these things of interest, for Venice, and the opportunity of Venice, for a prowl or two, as he called it, and a turn about, that he had looked his young man up, producing on the latter's part, as soon as the case had, with the lapse of a further twenty-four hours, so to find itself, the most incongruous yet most beneficent revulsion. Nothing could in fact have been more monstrous on the surface, and denture was well aware of it, than the relief he found during this short period in the tacit drop of all reference to the palace, in neither hearing news nor asking for it. That was what had come out for him on his visitor's entrance, even in the very seconds of suspense that were connecting the fact also directly and intensely with Millie's state. He had come to say he had saved her. He had come, as from Mrs. Stringham, to say how she might be saved. He had come in spite of Mrs. Stringham to say she was lost. The distinct throbs of hope, of fear, simultaneous for all their distinctness, merged their identity in a bound of the heart just as immediate and which remained after they had passed. It simply did wonders for him, this was the truth, that Sir Luke was, as he would have said, quiet. The result of it was the oddest consciousness as of a blessed calm after a storm. He had been trying for weeks, as we know, to keep superlatively still, and trying it largely in solitude and silence, but he looked back on it now as on the heat of fever. The real, the right stillness was this particular form of society. They walked together and they talked, looked at pictures again and recovered impressions. Sir Luke knew just what he wanted, haunted a little the dealers in old wares, sat down at Florians for rest and mild drinks, blessed above all 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, keeping them so for some minutes while his companion, the more easily watching his face for it, made private reflections on the subject of lost sleep. He had been up at night with her, he in person, for hours, but this was all he showed of it, and was apparently to remain his nearest approach to an illusion. The extraordinary thing was that Dencher could take it in perfectly as evidence, could turn cold at the image looking out of it, and yet that he could at the same time not intimate a throb of his response to accepted liberation. The liberation was an experience that held its own, and he continued to know why, in spite of his desserts, in spite of his folly, in spite of everything, he had so fondly hoped for it. 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 let him off. He was being let off, dealt with in the only way that didn't aggravate his responsibility. The beauty was also that this wasn't on system or on any basis of intimate knowledge, it was just by being a man of the world and by knowing life, by feeling the real that Sir Luke did him good. There had been in all the case too many women, a man's sense of it, another man's changed the air, and he wondered what man 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 mattered and what didn't, he distinguished between the essence and the shell, the just grounds and the unjust for fussing. One was thus, if one were concerned with him or exposed him at all, in his hands for whatever he should do, and not much less affected by his mercy than one might have been by his rigour. The grand thing, it did come to that, was the way he carried off, as one might fairly call it, the business of making odd things natural. Nothing, if they hadn't taken it so, could have exceeded the unexplained oddity between them, of dentures now complete detachment from the poor ladies at the palace. Nothing could have exceeded the no less marked anomaly of the great man's own abstentions of speech. He made, as he had done when they met at the station, nothing whatever of anything, and the effect of it, denture would have said, was a relation with him quite resembling that of doctor and patient. One took the cue from him, as one might have taken a dose, except that the cue was pleasant in the taking. That was why one could leave it to his tacit discretion, why for the three or four days denture again and again did so leave it, merely wandering a little at the most on the eve of Saturday, the announced term of the episode. Waiting once more on this latter occasion, at the Saturday morning, for Sir Luke's reappearance at the station, our friend had to recognise the drop of his own borrowed ease, the result naturally enough of the prospect of losing a support. The difficulty was that, on such lines as had served them, the support was Sir Luke's personal presence. Would he go without leaving some substitute for that, and without breaking either his silence in respect to his errand? Denture was in still deeper ignorance than at the hour of his call, and what was truly prodigious at so supreme a moment was that, as had immediately to appear, no gleam of light on what he had been living with for a week found its way out of him. What he had been doing was proof of a huge interest, as well as of a huge fee, yet when the leperély gondola again and somewhat tardily approached, his companion, watching from the water steps, studied his fine closed face as much as ever in vain. It was like a lesson from the highest authority on the subject of the relevant, so that its blankness affected denture of a sudden almost as a cruelty, feeling it quite awfully compatible as he did with Millie's having ceased to exist, and the suspense continued after they had passed together, as time was short 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 he involuntarily directed a long look at Eugenio, who met it, however, as only Eugenio could. Sir Luke's attention was given for the time to the right bestowal of his numerous effects, about which he was particular, and denture fairly found himself so far as silence could go, questioning the representative of the palace. It didn't humiliate him now, it didn't humiliate him even to feel that the personage exactly knew how little he satisfied him. Eugenio resembled to that extent Sir Luke, to the extent of the extraordinary things with which his facial habit was compatible. By the time, however, that denture had taken from it all its possessor intended, Sir Luke was free and with a handout for farewell. He offered the hand at first without speech, only on meeting his eyes could our young man see that they had never yet so completely looked at him. It was never with Sir Luke that they looked harder at one time than at another, but they looked longer, and this, even a shade of it, might mean on his part everything. It meant denture for ten seconds believed that Millie Theule was dead, so that the word at last spoken made him start. I shall come back. Then she's better. I shall come back within the month, Sir Luke repeated without heeding the question. He had dropped denture's hand, but he held him otherwise still. I bring you a message from Miss Theule, he said, as if they hadn't spoken of her. I'm commissioned to ask you from her to go and see her. Denture's rebound from his supposition had a violence that his stare betrayed. She asks me. Sir Luke had got into the carriage, the door of which the guard had closed, but he spoke again as he stood at the window, bending a little, but 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. Denture on the platform took it from him, but what he took brought the 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 denture, who in did did see, saw the sense of his friend's words, and saw beyond it as well, what Mrs. Stringham had announced, and what he had yet expected not to have to face, had then come. Sir Luke had kept it for the last, but there it was, and the colorless compact form it was now taking, the tone of one man of the world to another, who after what had happened would understand, was but the characteristic manner of his appeal. Denture was to understand remarkably 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 in his pause, while they continued to look at each other, the train had slowly creaked into motion. There was time but for one more word, and the 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 at the window while the train receded, holding him with it still. It was to be his nearest approach to the utter reference they had hitherto so successfully avoided. If it stood for everything, never had a face had to stand for more. So Denture, held after the train had gone, sharply reflected. So he reflected, asking himself into what abyss it pushed him, even while conscious of retreating under the maintained observation of Eugenio. End of Book 9th, Chapter 4. Book 10, Chapter 1 of The Wings of the Dove. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Jeanne Washington DC. The Wings of the Dove by Henry James. Book 10, Chapter 1. Then it has been, what do you say, a whole fortnight without your making a sign? Kate put that to him distinctly in a December dusk of Lancaster Gate and on the matter of the time he had been back. But he saw with it straight away that she was as admirably true as ever to her instinct, which was a system as well, of not admitting the possibility between them of small resentments, of trifles to trip up their general trust, that by itself the renewed beauty of it would at this fresh sight of her have stirred him to his depths, if something else, something no less vivid but quite separate hadn't stirred him still more. It wasn't seeing her that he felt that their interruption had been, and that they met across it even as persons whose adventures on either side, in time and space of the nature of perils and exiles, had had a particular strangeness. He wondered if he were as different for her as she herself had immediately appeared, which was but his way indeed of taking in with his thrill, that even going by the mere first look she had never been so handsome. That fact loomed for him, in the firelight and the lamp light that glowed their welcome to the London fog, as the flower of her different. Just as her difference itself, part of which was her striking him as older and a degree for which no mere couple of months could account, was the fruit of their intimate relation. If she was different, it was because they had chosen together that she should be, and she might now, as a proof of their wisdom, their success of the reality of what had happened, of what in fact for the spirit of each, was still happening, been showing it to him for pride. His having returned and yet kept for a number of days, so still, had been, he was quite aware, the first point he should have to tackle, with which consciousness indeed he had made a clear breast of it, and finally addressing Mrs. Louder, a note that had led to his present visit. He had written to Aud Maude, as the finer way, and it would doubtless have been to be noted that he needed no effort not to write to Kate. Venice was three weeks behind him, he had come up slowly, but it was still as if even in London he must conform to her law, that was exactly how he was able with his faith and her steadiness to appeal to her feeling for the situation, and explain his stretch of delicacy. He had 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, so the consequence was doubtless at bottom but one of the elements of intensity. He was gathering everything up, everything he should tell her, that took time, and the proof was that as he felt on the spot he couldn'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't be hard, as he in fact found, to produce for Kate's understanding his first reason. A fortnight, yes, it was a fortnight Friday, but I've only been keeping in, you see, with our wonderful system. He was so easily justified as that this of itself plainly enough prevented her saying she didn't see. Their wonderful system was accordingly still vivid for her, and such a gauge of its equal vividness for himself was precisely what she must have asked. He hadn't even to dot his eyes beyond the remark that on the very face of it, she would remember their wonderful system attached no premium to rapidities of transition. I couldn't quite, don't you know, take my rebound with a rush, and I suppose I've been instinctively hanging off to minimize, for you as well as for myself, the appearances are rushing. There's a sort of fitness, but I knew you'd understand. It was presently as if she really understood so well that she almost appealed from his insistence, yet looking at him too, he was not unconscious as if this mastery of fitnesses was a strong sign for her of what she had done to him. He might have struck her as expert for contingencies, in the very degree of her having in Venice struck him as expert. He smiled over his plea for renewal with stages and steps, a thing shaded as they might say, and graduated. Though finally as she must respond, she met the smile but as she had met his entrance five minutes before. Her soft gravity at that moment, which was yet not solemnity, but the look of a consciousness charged with life to the brim and wishing not to overflow, had not qualified her welcome. What had done this being much more the presence in the room for a couple of minutes of the footmen who had introduced him and who had been interrupted in preparing the tea table. Mrs. Lauders replied to Denture's note, had been to appoint the tea hour five o'clock on Sunday for his seeing them. Kate had thereafter wired him without a signature, come on Sunday before tea, about a quarter of an hour which will help us. And he had arrived therefore scrupulously at twenty minutes to five. Kate was alone in the room and hadn't delayed to tell him that Aunt Maude, as she had happily gathered, was to be, for the interval, not long with precious, engaged with the lone servant, retired in pension who had been paying her a visit and who was within the hour to depart again for the suburbs. They were to have the scrap of time after the withdrawal of the footmen to themselves. And there was a moment when, in spite of their wonderful system, in spite of the prescription of rushes and the propriety of shades, it proclaimed itself indeed precious. And all without prejudice. That was what kept it noble, to Kate's high sobriety in her beautiful self-command. If he had his discretion, she had her perfect manner which was her decorum. Mrs. Stringham he had to finish with the question of his delay, furthermore observed Mrs. Stringham would have written to Mrs. Louder of his having quitted the place, so that it wasn't as if he were hoping to cheat them. They'd know he was no longer there. Yes, we've known it. And you continue to hear? For Mrs. Stringham, certainly, by which I mean Aunt Maude does, the new recent news. Her face showed a wonder, up to within a day or two, I believe, but haven't you? No, I've heard nothing. And it was now that he felt how much he had to tell her. I don't get letters, but I've been sure Mrs. Louder does, with which he added, then, of course, you know. He waited as if she would show the what she knew, but she only showed in silence the dawn of a surprise that she couldn't control. There was nothing but for him to ask what he wanted. Is Mr. Dale alive? Kate's look at this was large. Don't you know? How should I, my dear, in the absence of everything? And he himself stared as for light. She's dead? Then, as with her eyes on him, she slowly shook her head, he uttered a strange, not yet. It came out in Kate's face that there were several questions on her lips, but the one she presently put was, is it very terrible? The manner of her so consciously and helplessly dying, he had to think a moment. Well, yes, since you asked me, very terrible to me, so far 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't quite tell you what it was, what it is for me. That's why I probably just sounded to you, he explained, as if I hoped it might be over. She gave him her quietest attention, but he by this time saw that, so far as telling her all was concerned, she would be divided between the wish and the reluctance to hear it, between the curiosity that, not unnaturally, would consume her in the opposing scruple of a respect from his fortune. The more she studied him, too, and he had never so felt her closely attached to his face, the more the choice of an attitude would become impossible to her. There would simply be a feeling uppermost, and the feeling wouldn't be eagerness. This perception grew in him fast, and he even, with his imagination, had for a moment the quick forecast of her possibly breaking out at him, should he go too far with a wonderful, what horrors are you telling me? It would have the sound, wouldn't it be open to him fairly to bring that out himself, of a repudiation, for pity and almost for shame, of everything that in Venice had passed between them. Not that she would confess to any return upon herself, not that she would let compunction or horror give her away, but it was in the air for him, yes, that she wouldn't want details, that she positively wouldn't take them, and that if he would generously understand it from her, she would prefer to keep him down. Nothing, however, was more definite for him that at 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 him handsomely. I can't believe, she said with perfect consideration, how dreadful for you much of it must have been. He didn't, however, take this up. There were things about which he wished for us to be clear. There is no other possibility by what you now know, I mean for her life. And he had just to insist she would say as little as she could. She is dying. She's dying. It was strange to him, in the matter of Millie, that Lancaster Gate could make him any sureer, yet what in the world in the matter of Millie wasn't strange. Nothing was so much so as his own behavior, his present as well as his past. He could but do as he must. Has Sir Luke's tread, 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 spoke otherwise after a minute. You won't know, unless you've perhaps seen him yourself, that Aunt Maude 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 an Aunt Maude's trying again three days ago to see him, that she heard at his house of his having gone. He had started, I believe, some days before. And won't then 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 she lives. He'll stay to the end, his magnificent. I think she is, said Kate. It had made them again look at each other long, and what it drew from him rather oddly was, oh, you don't know. Well, she's after all my friend. It was somehow, with her handsome demure, the answer he had least expected of her. It had 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, but this fell upon them. Which Densher, however, presently broke. If you don't think Mrs. Stringham's news real, what do you think of Lord Marks? She didn't think anything. Lord Marks? 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 what then took place that simply killed her. Oh, Kate seriously breathed. But she had turned pale, and he saw that whatever her degree of ignorance of these connections, it wasn't put on. Mrs. Stringham hasn't said that. He observed nonetheless that she didn't ask what had then taken place, and he went on with his contribution to her knowledge. The way it affected her was that it made her give up. She has given up beyond all power to care again, and that's why she's dying. Oh, Kate once more slowly sighed, but with a vagueness that made him pursue. One can see now that she was living by will, which was very much what you originally told me of her. I remember, that was it. Well, then her will, at a given moment, broke down, and the collapse was determined by thy fellows this startling stroke. He told her, this scoundrel, 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 at it, he does know it. When he continued, did you last see him? But she was lost now in the picture before her. That was what made her worse? He watched her take it in. It's so added to her somber beauty. Then he spoke 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 he continued consistently. She learned it, you see, too soon, since of course 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 not being between us, so far at least as you were concerned, anything she need regardless of 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 was by the convictions 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 at her tone made him for the instant regret his comment, which indeed had been the first that rose to his lips as an effect absolutely of what they would have called between them her straightness. Their straightness, visibly, was all his own loyalty could ask. Still, that was comparatively beside the mark. Of course, I don't suppose anything but that we are together in our recognition, our responsibilities, whatever we choose to call them. It isn't a question for us of apportioning shares or distinguishing individually among such impressions 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 strained character as queer. Don't go into that. It was perhaps not as going into it that she had another idea, an idea born, she showed, of the vision he had just evoked. Wouldn't it have been possible then to deny the truth of the information? I mean of Lord Marx. 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 by Kate being exactly the alternative he had had to face in Venice and to put utterly away from him. Nothing was stranger than such a difference in 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 to be remembered, she had always simplified and had brought back his sense of the degree in which to her energy as compared with his own, many things were easy. The very sense that so often before had moved him to admiration. Well, if you must know, and I want you to be clear about it, I didn't even seriously think of a denial to her face. The question of it, as possibly saving her, was put to me definitely enough, but to turn it over was only to dismiss it. Besides he had it, it wouldn't have done any good. You mean she would have had no faith in your correction? She had spoken with a promptitude that affected him of a sudden as almost glib, but he himself paused with the overweight of all he meant, and she meanwhile went on. Did you try? I hadn't even a chance. Kate maintained her wonderful manner, the manner of at once having it all before her, and yet keeping it all at its distance. She wouldn't see 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 face to the wall. This again for a moment hushed her, and they were both too grave now for parents that have pity, but her interest came out for at least the minimum of light. She refused even to let you speak to her. My dear girl, Densher returned, she was miserably prohibitively ill. Well, that was what she had been before, and it didn't prevent? No, Densher admitted, it didn't, and I don't pretend 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 advanced that she would perhaps sound him much more deeply, asking him above all two or three specific things. He had fairly fancied her even wanting to know and trying to find out how far, as the odious phrase was, he and Millie had gone, and how near by the same token they had come. He had asked himself if he were prepared to hear her do that, and had had to take for answer that he was prepared, of course, for everything. Wasn't he prepared for her ascertaining if her two or three prophecies had found time to be made true? He had fairly believed himself ready to say whether or not the overture of Millie'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 such things were concerned, his redness wouldn't be taxed. Kate's pressure on the question of what had taken place remained so admirably general that even her present inquiry kept itself free of sharpness. So then, that after Lord Mark's interference you never again met? It was what he had been all the while coming to. No, we met once, so far as it could be called a meeting. I had stayed, I didn't come away. That, said Kate, was no more than decent. Presciently, 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 had wanted to. What did it signify, either? She was dying. Well, Kate in a manner persisted. Why not just because she was dying? She had however all her discretion, but of course I know that seeing her you could judge. Of course seeing her I could judge, and I did see her. If I had denied you more over, than she said with his eyes on her, I'd have stuck to it. She took for a moment the intention of his face. You mean that to convince 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 it back afterwards. With this quickly light came for her, with it also her color flamed. Oh, you'd have broken with me to make your denial a truth? You'd have chucked me? She embraced it perfectly. To save your conscience? I couldn't have done anything else, said Martin Densher, so you see how right I was not to commit myself, and how little I could dream of it. 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 that once to which he pointed. You've fallen in love with her. Well then say so, with a dying woman. Why need you mind it, what does it matter? It came from him the question straight out of the intensity of relation and the face-to-face necessity into which, from the first, from his entering the room, they had found themselves thrown, but it gave them their most extraordinary moment. Wait till she is dead, Mrs. Stringham, Kate added, is the telegraph, after which an atone still different. For what then, she asked, did Milly send for you? It was what I tried to make up before I went. I must tell you moreover that I had no doubt of its really being to give me, as you say, a chance. She believed, I suppose, that I might deny, and what to my own mind was before me and going to her was the certainty that she'd put me to my test. She wanted from my own lips, so I saw it, the truth, but I was with her there for twenty minutes, and she never asked me for it. She never wanted the truth, Kate had a high head shake. She wanted you. She would have taken from you what you could give her, and been glad of it. Even if she had known it false, you might have lied to her from pity, and she have seen you and felt you lie, and yet, since it was Olly for tenderness, she would have thanked you, and blessed you, and clung to you but the more. For that was your strength, my dear man, that she loves you with passion. Oh, my strength! dense your coldly murmured. Otherwise, since she had sent for you, what was it to ask of you? And then, quite without irony, as he waited a moment to say, was it just once more to look at you? She had nothing to ask me, nothing that is but not to stay any longer. She did to that extent want to see me. She had supposed at first, after he had been with her, that I had seen the propriety of taking myself off. Then, since I hadn't seen my propriety as I did in another way, she found days later that I was still there. This, said Denture, affected her. Of course it affected her. Again she struck him for all her dignity as glib. If it wasn't somehow for her I was still staying, she wished that to end. She wished me to know how little there was need of it, and as a moment of farewell, she wished 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 I did, 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 having stayed. 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, Kate added, 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 a visit, just like another. Like another person? Like another visit? Oh, said Kate, which had apparently the effect of slightly arresting his speech, and arrest she took advantage of to continue, making with it indeed her nearest approach to an inquiry of the kind against which he had braced himself. Did she receive you, in her condition, in her room? Not she, said Martin Densher. She received me just as usual, in that glorious great salon, in the dress she always wears, from her inveterate corner of her sofa. And his face for the moment conveyed the scene, just as hers equally embraced it. Do you remember what you originally 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, and feeling how nobody but Kate could have invested such a question with the tone that was perfectly right. She meanwhile, however, patiently waited. I don't think I can attempt to say now what it was, some day perhaps, for it would be worth it for us. Someday, certainly, she seemed to record the promise, yet she spoke again abruptly. She'll recover. Well, said Densher, you'll see. She had the air and instant of trying to. Did she show anything of her feeling? I mean, Kate explained of her feeling of having been misled. She didn't press hard, surely, but he was just mentioned that he would have rather to glide. She showed nothing but her beauty and her strength. 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 given it 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 ever alienated. 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, during the previous time. If it had been on the illness, it would have made no difference 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 have known 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 a person who does see. Kate bought. 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 you needn't be afraid. I'm not afraid, said denture. Kate moved from her place then, looking at the clock, which marked five. She gave her attention to the tea table, where Aunt Maude's huge silver kettle, which had been exposed to its lamp and which she had not soon enough noticed, was hissing too hard. Well, it's almost wonderful. She explained that she rather too profusely assigned her friend noticed, ladled tea into the pot. He watched her a moment at this occupation, coming nearer the table while she put in the steaming water. You'll have some? He hesitated. Hadn't we better wait? Front Maude? She saw what he meant, the deprecation, by the old law of betrayals of the intimate note. Oh, you needn't mind now. We've done it. Humbugged her. Squared her. You've pleased her. Denture mechanically accepted his tea. He was thinking of stuff something else, and his thought in a moment came out. What a brute then I must be. A brute? To have pleased so many people. Ah, said Kate with a gleam of gaiting. You've done it to please me. But she was already with her gleam reverting a little. What I don't understand is, won't you have any sugar? Yes, please. What I don't understand, she went on, when she hell helped him, is what it was that had occurred to bring her round again, if she gave you up for days and days would brought her back to you. She asked the question with her own cup in her hand, but it found him ready enough in spite of his sense of the eronic oddity of there going into it over the tea table. It was Sir Luke's tread her brought her back. 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 of her. 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. The great thing Kate then resumed is that she satisfied, which she continued 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 in the fire. The peace of having loved. He raised her eyes to her. Is that peace? Of having been loved, she went on. That is, of having, she wound up, realized her passion. She wanted nothing more. She has had all she wanted. Lucid and always grave, she gave this out with a beautiful authority that he could for the time meet with no words. He could only again look at her, though with the sense and so doing that he made her more than he intended take his silence for a scent. Quite indeed, as if she did so take it, she quitted the table and came to the fire. You may think it hideous that I should now, that I should yet, she made a point of the 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 came to him in Venice, the quickly returning memory of which intensified and enriched the fact. He could practically deny in such conditions nothing that she said, and what she said was with it visibly a fruit of that knowledge. We've succeeded. She spoke with her eyes deep on his own. She won't have loved you for nothing. It made him wince, but she insisted, and you won't have loved me. End of Book 10, Chapter 1, Recording by Jeanne Washington, D.C. He was to remain for several days under the deep impression of this inclusive passage, so luckily prolonged from moment to moment, but interrupted at its climax, as may be said, by the entrance of Aunt Maude, who found them standing together near the fire. The bearings of the colloquy, however, sharp as they were, were less sharp to his intelligence, strangely enough, than those of a talk with Mrs. Lauder alone, for which she soon gave him, or for which perhaps rather Kate gave him, full occasion. What had happened on her at last joining them was to conduce he could immediately see to her desiring to have him to herself. Kate and he, no doubt, at the beginning of the door, had fallen apart with a certain suddenness, so that she had turned her hard, fine eyes from one to the other. But the effect of this lost itself, to his mind, the next minute, in the effect of his companion's rare alertness. She instantly spoke to her aunt of what had first been uppermost for herself, inviting her thereby intimately to join them, and doing it, the more happily also, no doubt, because the fact she resentfully named gave her ample support. Had you quite understood, my dear, that it's full three weeks? And she effaced herself, as if to leave Mrs. Lauder to deal with her own point of view with this extravagance. Densher, of course, straightway noted that his cue for the protection of Kate was to make, no less, all of it he could, and their tracks, as he might have said, were fairly covered by the time their hostess had taken afresh on his renewed admission the measure of his scant eagerness. Kate had moved away as if no great showing were needed for her personal situation to be seen as delicate. She had been entertaining their visitor on her aunt's behalf, a visitor she had been at one time suspected of favoring too much, and who now came back to them as the stricken suitor of another person. It wasn't that the fate of the other person, her exquisite friend, didn't, in its tragic turn, also concern herself. It was only that her acceptance of Mr. Densher as a source of information could scarcely help having an awkwardness. She invented the awkwardness under Densher's eyes, and he marveled on his side at the instant creation. It served her as the fine cloud that hangs about a goddess in an epic, and the young man was but vaguely to know at what point of the rest of his visit she had, for consideration, melted into it and out of sight. He was taken up promptly with another matter, the truth of the remarkable difference, neither more nor less, that the events of Venice had introduced into his relation with Aunt Maude and that these weeks of their separation had caused quite richly to ripen for him. She had not sat down to her tea-table before he felt himself on terms with her, that were absolutely new, nor would she press on him a second cup without her seeming herself, and quite wittingly, so to define and establish them. She regretted, but she quite understood, that what was taking place had obliged him to hang off. They had, after hearing of him from poor Susan as gone, been hoping for an early sight of him. They would have been interested, naturally, in his arriving straight from the scene. Yet she needed no reminder that the scene precisely by which she meant the tragedy that had so detained and absorbed him, the memory, the shadow, the sorrow of it, was what marked him for unsociability. She thus presented him to himself, as it were, in the guise in which she had now adopted him, and it was the element of truth in the character that he found himself for his own part adopting. She treated him as blighted and ravaged, as frustrate and already bereft, and for him to feel that this opened for him a new chapter of frankness with her, he scarce had also to perceive how it smoothed his approaches to 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 hostile to 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 freely for his prescribed attitude, and he need hardly ever be out of it. Stranger than anything more over was to be the way that by the end of the week he stood convicted to his own sense of a surrender to Mrs. Lauder's view. He had somehow met it at a point that had brought him on, brought him on a distance that he couldn't again retrace. He had private hours of wondering what had become of his sincerity. He had others of simply reflecting that he had it all in use. His only want of candor was Aunt Ma's wealth of sentiment. She was hugely sentimental, and the worst he did was to take it from her. He wasn't so himself. Everything was too real, but it was nonetheless not false that he had been through a mill. It was in particular not false, for instance, that when she said to him on the Sunday almost causally from her sofa behind the tea, I want 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 was with him to the end, or she might be, in a way Kate wasn't, and even if it literally made her society meanwhile more soothing, he must just brush away the question of why it shouldn't. Was he professing to her in any degree the possession of an aftersense that wasn't real? How in the world could he, when his aftersense, day by day, was his greatest reality? Such only was at bottom what there was between them, and two or three times over it made the hour pass. These were occasions, two and a scrap, on which he had come and gone without mention of Kate. Now that almost as never yet he had licensed to ask for her, the queer turn of their affair made it a false note. It was another queer turn, that when he talked with Aunt Maude about Millie, nothing else seemed to come up. He called upon her almost avowedly for that purpose, and it was the queerest turn of all that the state of his nerves should require it. He liked her better, if she was really behaving, he had occasion to say to himself, as if he liked her best. The thing was absolutely that she met him halfway. Nothing could have been broader than her vision, than her locosity, than her sympathy. It appeared to gratify, to satisfy her, to see him as he was. That too had its effect. It was all, of course, the last thing that could have seemed on the cards, a change by which he was completely free with this lady, and it wouldn't indeed have come about if, for another monstrosity, he hadn't seized to be free with Kate. Thus it was that on the third time, in special of being alone with her, he found himself uttering to the elder woman what had been impossible of utterance to the younger. Mrs. Lauder gave him, in fact, on the ground of what he must keep from her but one easy moment. That was when, on the first Sunday, after Kate had suppressed herself, she referred to her regret that he might not have stayed to the end. He found his reason difficult to give her, but she came after all to 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, men haven'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 away for the special reason that you so frankly appreciate it. Densher had said nothing about his appreciation. Hadn't his behavior since the hour itself sufficiently shown it? But he presently said he couldn't help going so far. I don't doubt, certainly, that Miss Croy would have stayed. And he saw again into the bargain what a marvel was Susan Shepard. She did nothing but protect him. She had done nothing but keep it up. In copious communication with the friend of her youth, she had yet, it was plain, favored this lady with nothing that compromised him. Millie's act of renouncement she had described, but as a change for the worse. She had mentioned Lord Mark's descent, as even without her it might be known, so that she mustn't appear to conceal it. But she had suppressed explanations and connections, and indeed, for all he knew, blessed Puritan soul had invented commendable fictions. Thus it was absolutely that he was at his ease. Thus it was, shaking forever in the unrest that didn't stop his cross-leg. He leaned back in deep yellow satin chairs and took such comfort as came. She asked, it was true Aunt Maude, questions that Kate hadn't, but this was just the difference, that from her he positively liked them. He had taken with himself on leaving Venice the resolution to regard Millie as already dead to him, that being for his spirit the only thinkable way to pass the time of waiting. He had left her because it was what suited her, 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 his interval. Suspense was the ugliest ache to him, and he would have nothing to do with it. The last thing he wished was to be unconscious of her. What he wished to ignore was her own consciousness, tortured for all he knew, crucified by its pain. Knowingly to hang about in London while the pain went on, what would that do but make his days impossible? His scheme was accordingly to convince himself, and by some art about which he was vague that the tense of waiting had passed. What, in fact, he restlessly reflected, have I any further to do with it? Let me assume the thing actually over, as it at any moment may be, and I become good again for something, at least to somebody. I'm good, as it is, for nothing to anybody, least of all to her. He consequently tried, so far as shutting his eyes and stalking grimly about was a trial. But his plan was carried out, it may well be guessed, neither with marked success, nor with marked consistency. The days, whether lapsing or lingering, or a stiff reality, the suppression of anxiety was a thin idea. The taste of life itself was the taste of suspense. That he was waiting was, in short, at the bottom of everything, and it required no great sifting presently to feel that if he took so much more, as he called it, to Mrs. Louder, this was just for that reason. She helped him to hold out, all the while that she was subtle enough, and he could see her divine it as what he wanted, not to insist on the actuality of their attention. His nearest approach to success was thus in being good for something to aunt Maude, in default of anyone better. Her company eased his nerves, even while they pretended together, that they had seen their tragedy out. They spoke of the dying girl in the past tense. They said no worse of her than she had been, stupendous. On the other hand, however, and this was what wasn't for dents or pure peace, they insisted enough that stupendous was the word. It was the thing, this recognition, that kept him most quiet. He came to it with her repeatedly, talking about it against time, and in particular, we have noted, speaking of his supreme personal impression, as he hadn't spoken to Kate. It was almost as if she herself enjoyed the perfection of the pathos. She sat there before the scene, as he couldn't help giving it out to her. Very much as a stout citizen's wife might have sat, during a play that made people cry, in the pit or the family circle. What most deeply stirred her was the way the poor girl must have wanted to live. Ah, yes indeed, she did, she did. Why, in pity, shouldn't she, with everything to fill her world? The mere money of her, the darling, if it isn't too disgusting at such a time to mention that. Aunt Maude mentioned it, and dents are quite understood, but is fairly giving poetry to the life Milly clung to, a view of the might have been before which the good lady was hushed and knew to tears. She had had her 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 about them, what was the cruelty of the event but a cruelty of a sort to herself? That came out when he named, as THE horrible thing to know, the fact of their young friend's unapproachable terror of the end. Keep it down though she would. Coming out, therefore, often, since in so naming, he found the strangest of reliefs. He allowed it all its vividness, as if on the principle of his not at least spiritually shirking. Milly had held with passion to her dream of a future, and she was separated from it, not shrieking indeed, but grimly, awfully silent, as one might imagine some noble young victim of the scaffold in the French Revolution, separated at the prison door from some object clutched for resistance. Dentsher, in a cold moment, so pictured the case for Mrs. Louder, but no moment cold enough had yet come to make him so picture it to Kate. And it was the front so presented that had been in Milly heroic, presented with the highest heroism aunt Maude by this time knew on the occasion of his taking leave of her. He had let her know, absolutely for the girl's glory, how he had been received on that occasion with a positive effect, since she was indeed so perfectly the princess that Mrs. Stringham always called her of princely state. Before the fire in the great room that was all aborusks and cherubs, all gaiety and guilt, and that was warm at that hour too with a wealth of autumn sun, the state in question had been maintained, and the situation, well, Dentsher said for the convenience of exquisite London gossip, sublime. The gossip, for it came to as much as Lancaster Gate, wasn't the less exquisite for his use of the silver veil, nor, on the other hand, was the veil so touched too much drawn aside. He himself, for that matter, took in the scene again at moments as from the page of a book. He saw a young man, far off and in a relation inconceivable, saw him hushed, passive, staying his breath, but half understanding, yet dimly conscious of something immense and holding himself painfully together not to lose it. The young man at these moments so seen was too distant and too strange for the right identity, and yet, outside, afterwards, it was his own face Dentsher had known. He had known then, at the same time, that the young man had been conscious of, and he was to measure after that, day by day, how little he had lost. At present, there with Mrs. Louder, he knew he had gathered all that passed between them mutely, as in the intervals of their associated gaze they exchanged looks of intelligence. This was as far as association could go, but it was far enough when she knew the essence. The essence was that something had happened to him too beautiful and too sacred to describe. He had been, to his recovered sense, forgiven, dedicated, blessed. But this he couldn't coherently express. It would have required an explanation, fatal to Mrs. Louder's faith in him, of the nature of Millie's wrong. So, as to the wonderful scene, they just stood at the door. They had the sense of the presence within. They felt the charged stillness, after which their association deepened by it, they turned together away. That itself, indeed, for our restless friend, became, by the end of the week, the very principle of reaction, so that he woke up one morning with such a sense of having played a part as he needed self-respect to gainsay. He hadn't, in the least, stated at Lancaster Gate that, as a haunted man, a man haunted with a memory, he was harmless. But the degree to which Mrs. Louder accepted, admired, and explained his new aspect laid upon him practically the weight of a declaration. What he hadn't, in the least, stated her own manner was perpetually stating it was as haunted and harmless that she was constantly putting him down. There offered itself, however, to his purpose such an element as plain honesty, and he had embraced, by the time he dressed, his proper corrective. They were on the edge of Christmas. But Christmas this year was, as in the London of so many other years, disconcertingly mild. The still air was soft, the thick light was gray, the great town looked empty, and in the park where the grass was green, where the sheep browsed, where the birds multitudinously twittered, the straight walks lent themselves to slowness and the dim vistas to privacy. He held it fast this morning, till he had got out, his sacrifice to honor, and then went with it to the nearest post office, and fixed it fast in a telegram, thinking of it moreover as a sacrifice, only because he had, for reasons, felt it as an effort. Its character of effort it would owe to Kate's expected resistance, not less probable than on the occasion of past appeals, which was precisely why he, perhaps innocently, made his 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 a good deal of it in one way and another, representing, as it did, a rich impulse in costing him a couple of shillings. There was also a moment later on that day when, in the park, as he measured watchfully one of their old alleys, he might have been supposed by a cynical critic to be reckoning his chance of getting his money back. He was waiting, but he had waited of old. Lancaster Gate, as a danger, was practically at hand, but she had risked that danger before. Besides, it was smaller now, with the queer turn of their affair, in spite of which, indeed, he was graver as he lingered and looked out. Kate came at last, by the way, he had thought least likely, came as if she had started from the marble arch, but her advent was response. That was the great matter. Response marked in her face was agreeable to him, even after Aunt Maude's responses, as nothing had been since his return to London. She had not, it was true, answered his wire, and he had begun to fear, as she was late, that with the instinct of what he might be again intending to press upon her, she had decided, though not with ease, to deprive him of his chance. He would have, of course, she knew other chances, but she perhaps saw the present as offering her special danger. This, in fact, denture could himself feel, was exactly why he had so prepared it, and he had rejoiced, even while he waited, in all that 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 same place, by a whim of the weather, almost as much to their purpose as the days of sunny afternoons when they had taken their first trists. This, and that tree within sight on the grass, stretched bare boughs over the couple of chairs in which they had sat of old, and in which, for they really could sit down again, they might recover the clearness of their prime. It was to all intents, however, that this very reference that showed itself in Kate's face as, with her swift motion, she came toward him. It helped him, her swift motion, when it finally brought her nearer, helped him, for that matter, at first, if only by showing him afresh how terribly well she looked. It had been all along, he certainly remembered, a phenomenon of no rarity that he had felt her at particular moments handsomer than ever before. One of these, for instance, being still present to him as her entrance, under her aunt's eyes at Lancaster Gate, the day of his dinner there after his return from America. And another, her aspect on the same spot two Sundays ago, the light in which she struck the eyes he had brought back from Venice. In the course of a minute or two now he got, as he had got at the other times, his apprehension of the special stamp of the fortune of the moment. Whatever it had been determined by, as the different hours recurring to him, it took on at present a prompt connection with an effect produced for him in truth more than once during the past week, only now much intensified. This effect he had already noted and named. It was that of the attitude assumed by his friend in the presence of the degree of response on his part to Mrs. Lauder's welcome which he couldn't possibly have failed to notice. She had noticed it, and she had beautifully shown him so, wearing in its honor the finest shade of studied serenity, a shade almost of gaiety over the workings of time. Everything, of course, was relative, with the shadow they were living under, but her condemnation of the way in which he now, for confidence, distinguished aunt Maude, had almost the note of cheer. She had so, by her own air, consecrated the distinction, individuals in respect to herself, though it might be, and nothing, really, more than this demonstration could have given him had he still wanted it to measure of her superiority. It was doubtless for that matter, the superiority alone, that on the winter noon gave smooth decision to her step and charming courage to her eyes, a courage that deepened in them when he had presently got to what he did want. He had delayed after she had joined him not much more than long enough for him to say to her, drawing her hand into his arm, and turning off where they had turned of old, that he wouldn't pretend he hadn't lately had moments of not quite believing he should ever again be so happy. She answered, passing over the reasons whatever they had been of his doubt, that her own belief was in high happiness for them if they would only have patience, though nothing at the same time could be dearer than his idea for their walk. It was only make-believe, of course, with what had taken place for them, that they couldn't meet at home. She spoke of their opportunities as suffering at no point. He had, at any rate, soon let her know that he wished the present one to suffer at none, and in a quiet spot, beneath a great wintry 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 to wait another day. Our marriage will, fundamentally, somehow, don't you see, write everything that's wrong, and I can't express to you my impatience. We've only to announce it, and it takes off the wait. To announce it, Kate asked. She spoke as if not understanding, though she had listened to him without confusion. To accomplish it, then, tomorrow, if you will, do it, and announce it as done. That's the least part of it. After it, nothing will matter. We shall be so right, he said, that we shall be strong. We shall only wonder at our past fear. It will seem an ugly madness. It will seem a bad dream. She looked at him without flinching, with the look she had brought at his call. But he felt now the strange chill of her brightness. My dear man, 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 am that you must have me. He saw her try for a time to appear to consider it. But he saw her also not consider it. Yet, he saw her, felt her further. He heard her, with her clear voice, try to be intensely kind with him. I don't see, you know, what has changed. She had a large, strange smile. We've been going on together so well, and you suddenly desert me. It made him helplessly 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 I was, and you must give me some better reason than you do my dear, for you're not being. It seems to me, she continued, that we're only right as to what has been between us so long as we do wait. I don't think we wish to have behave like fools. He took in while she talked her in perturbable consistency, which it was quietly, querily hopeless to see her stand there and breathe into their mild remembering air. He had brought her there to be moved, and she was only immovable, which was not, moreover, either, because she didn't understand. She understood everything, and things he refused to, and she had reasons deep down, the sense of which nearly sickened him. She had two, again, most of all, her strange, significant smile. Of course, if it's that you really know something, it was quite conceivable and possible to her. He could see that he did, but he didn't even know what she meant, and he only looked at her and gloom. His gloom, however, didn't upset her. You do, I believe, only you have a delicacy about saying it. Your delicacy, to me, my dear, is a scruple too much. I should have no delicacy in hearing 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 case, wait, and I can see what you mean by thinking it nicer of us not to. I don't even ask you, she continued, for a proof. I'm content with your moral certainty. By this time, it had come over him. It had the force of a rush. The point she made was clear, as clear as that the blood, while she recognized 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 tomorrow, today. I'd go home this moment and announce it to Aunt Maude, for an idea. I mean an idea straight from you. I mean as your own, given me in good faith. There, my dear, and she smiled again, I call that really meeting you. If it was, then, what she called it, it disposed of his appeal, and he could but stand there with this wasted passion, for it was in high passion that he had from the morning acted in his face. She made it all out, bent upon her, the idea he didn't have, that the idea he had, and his failure of insistence when it brought up that challenge, and his sense of her personal presence, and his horror, almost, of her lucidity. They made in him a mixture that might have been rage, but that was turning quickly to mere cold thought, thought which led to something else and was like a new dim dawn. It affected her then, and she 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 she leaned to him, into their old pair of chairs, she prevented irresistibly, she forestalled the waste of his passion. She had an advantage with his passion now.