Kate slowly rose; it was, since she had lighted the candles and sat down, the first movement she had made. “Are you trying to fix it on me that I must have told him?”

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

“What has he indeed?” Kate asked.

She shook her head as if in recovery, within the minute, of some mild allowance for his unreason. There was in it—and for his reason really—one of those half-inconsequent sweetnesses by which she had often before made, over some point of difference, her own terms with him. Practically she was making them now, and essentially he was knowing it; yet inevitably, all the same, he was accepting it. She stood there close to him, with something in her patience that suggested her having supposed, when he spoke more appealingly, that he was going to kiss her. He hadn’t been, it appeared; but his continued appeal was none the less the quieter. “What’s he doing, from ten o’clock on Christmas morning, with Mrs. Lowder?”

Kate looked surprised. “Didn’t she tell you he’s staying there?”

“At Lancaster Gate?” Densher’s surprise met it. “ ‘Staying’?—since when?”

“Since day before yesterday. He was there before I came away.” And then she explained—confessing it in fact anomalous. “It’s an accident—like Aunt Maud’s having herself remained in town for Christmas, but it isn’t after all so monstrous. We stayed—and, with my having come here, she’s sorry now—because we neither of us, waiting from day to day for the news you brought, seemed to want to be with a lot of people.”

“You stayed for thinking of—Venice?”

“Of course we did. For what else? And even a little,” Kate wonderfully added—“it’s true at least of Aunt Maud—for thinking of you.”

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

“His being in London, I believe, is a very commonplace matter. He has some rooms which he has had suddenly some rather advantageous chance to let—such as, with his confessed, his decidedly proclaimed want of money, he hasn’t had it in him, in spite of everything, not to jump at.”

Densher’s attention was entire. “In spite of everything? In spite of what?”

“Well, I don’t know. In spite, say, of his being scarcely supposed to do that sort of thing.”

“To try to get money?”

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

Kate had been somehow, for her companion, through this statement, beautifully, quite soothingly, suggestive. “Told you, you mean, so that you needn’t leave the house?”

“Yes—so far as she had taken it into her head that his being there was part of my reason.”

“And was it part of your reason?”

“A little if you like. Yet there’s plenty here—as I knew there would be—without it. So that,” she said candidly, “doesn’t matter. I’m glad I am here: even if for all the good I do—!” She implied however that that didn’t matter either. “He didn’t, as you tell me, get off then to Matcham; though he may possibly, if it is possible, be going this afternoon. But what strikes me as most probable—and it’s really, I’m bound to say, quite amiable of him—is that he has declined to leave Aunt Maud, as I’ve been so ready to do, to spend her Christmas alone. If moreover he has given up Matcham for her it’s a procédé that won’t please her less. It’s small wonder therefore that she insists, on a dull day, in driving him about. I don’t pretend to know,” she wound up, “what may happen between them; but that’s all I see in it.”

“You see in everything, and you always did,” Densher returned, “something that, while I’m with you at least, I always take from you as the truth itself.”

She looked at him as if consciously and even carefully extracting the sting of his reservation; then she spoke with a quiet gravity that seemed to show how fine she found it. “Thank you.” It had for him, like everything else, its effect. They were still closely face to face, and, yielding to the impulse to which he hadn’t yielded just before, he laid his hands on her shoulders, held her hard a minute and shook her a little, far from untenderly, as if in expression of more mingled things, all difficult, than he could speak. Then bending his head he applied his lips to her cheek. He fell, after this, away for an instant, resuming his unrest, while she kept the position in which, all passive and as a statue, she had taken his demonstration. It didn’t prevent her, however, from offering him, as if what she had had was enough for the moment, a further indulgence. She made a quiet lucid connection and as she made it sat down again. “I’ve been trying to place exactly, as to its date, something that did happen to me while you were in Venice. I mean a talk with him. He spoke to me—spoke out.”

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

“Well, if I’m ‘there,’ as you so gracefully call it, by having refused to meet him as he wanted—as he pressed—I plead guilty to being so. Would you have liked me,” she went on, “to give him an answer that would have kept him from going?”

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

“Never for a moment; but I’m afraid that—even if it doesn’t fit your strange suppositions—I should have given him just the same answer if I had known. If it’s a matter I haven’t, since your return, thrust upon you, that’s simply because it’s not a matter in the memory of which I find a particular joy. I hope that if I’ve satisfied you about it,” she continued, “it’s not too much to ask of you to let it rest.”

“Certainly,” said Densher kindly, “I’ll let it rest.” But the next moment he pursued: “He saw something. He guessed.”

“If you mean,” she presently returned, “that he was unfortunately the one person we hadn’t deceived, I can’t contradict you.”

“No—of course not. But why,” Densher still risked, “was he unfortunately the one person—? He’s not really a bit intelligent.”

“Intelligent enough apparently to have seen a mystery, a riddle, in anything so unnatural as—all things considered and when it came to the point—my attitude. So he gouged out his conviction, and on his conviction he acted.”

Densher seemed for a little to look at Lord Mark’s conviction as if it were a blot on the face of nature. “Do you mean because you had appeared to him to have encouraged him?”

“Of course I had been decent to him. Otherwise where were we?”

“ ‘Where’—?”

“You and I. What I appeared to him, however, hadn’t mattered. What mattered was how I appeared to Aunt Maud. Besides, you must remember that he has had all along his impression of you. You can’t help it,” she said, “but you’re after all—well, yourself.”

“As much myself as you please. But when I took myself to Venice and kept myself there—what,” Densher asked, “did he make of that?”

“Your being in Venice and liking to be—which is never on anyone’s part a monstrosity—was explicable for him in other ways. He was quite capable moreover of seeing it as dissimulation.”

“In spite of Mrs. Lowder?”

“No,” said Kate, “not in spite of Mrs. Lowder now. Aunt Maud, before what you call his second descent, hadn’t convinced him—all the more that my refusal of him didn’t help. But he came back convinced.” And then as her companion still showed a face at a loss: “I mean after he had seen Milly, spoken to her and left her. Milly convinced him.”

“Milly?” Densher again but vaguely echoed.

“That you were sincere. That it was her you loved.” It came to him from her in such a way that he instantly, once more, turned, found himself yet again at his window. “Aunt Maud, on his return here,” she meanwhile continued, “had it from him. And that’s why you’re now so well with Aunt Maud.”

He only for a minute looked out in silence—after which he came away. “And why you are.” It was almost, in its extremely affirmative effect between them, the note of recrimination; or it would have been perhaps rather if it hadn’t been so much more the note of truth. It was sharp because it was true, but its truth appeared to impose it as an argument so conclusive as to permit on neither side a sequel. That made, while they faced each other over it without speech, the gravity of everything. It was as if there were almost danger, which the wrong word might start. Densher accordingly at last acted to better purpose: he drew, standing there before her, a pocketbook from the breast of his waistcoat and he drew from the pocketbook a folded letter to which her eyes attached themselves. He restored then the receptacle to its place and, with a movement not the less odd for being visibly instinctive and unconscious, carried the hand containing his letter behind him. What he thus finally spoke of was a different matter. “Did I understand from Mrs. Lowder that your father’s in the house?”

If it never had taken her long in such excursions to meet him it was not to take her so now. “In the house, yes. But we needn’t fear his interruption”—she spoke as if he had thought of that. “He’s in bed.”

“Do you mean with illness?”

She sadly shook her head. “Father’s never ill. He’s a marvel. He’s only—endless.”

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

“Yes.” She perfectly, wearily, almost serenely, had it all. “By our making your visit as little of an affair as possible for him—and for Marian too.”

“I see. They hate so your seeing me. Yet I couldn’t—could I?—not have come.”

“No, you couldn’t not have come.”

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

Quickly it almost upset her. “Ah don’t, today, put ugly words into my mouth. I’ve enough of my trouble without it.”

“I know—I know!” He spoke in instant pleading. “It’s all only that I’m as troubled for you. When did he come?”

“Three days ago—after he hadn’t been near her for more than a year, after he had apparently, and not regrettably, ceased to remember her existence; and in a state which made it impossible not to take him in.”

Densher hesitated. “Do you mean in such want—?”

“No, not of food, of necessary things—not even, so far as his appearance went, of money. He looked as wonderful as ever. But he was—well, in terror.”

“In terror of what?”

“I don’t know. Of somebody—of something. He wants, he says, to be quiet. But his quietness is awful.”

She suffered, but he couldn’t not question. “What does he do?”

It made Kate herself hesitate. “He cries.”

Again for a moment he hung fire, but he risked it. “What has he done?”

It made her slowly rise, and they were once more fully face to face. Her eyes held his own and she was paler than she had been. “If you love me—now—don’t ask me about father.”

He waited again a moment. “I love you. It’s because I love you that I’m here. It’s because I love you that I’ve brought you this.” And he drew from behind him the letter that had remained in his hand.

But her eyes only—though he held it out—met the offer. “Why you’ve not broken the seal!”

“If I had broken the seal—exactly—I should know what’s within. It’s for you to break the seal that I bring it.”

She looked—still not touching the thing—inordinately grave. “To break the seal of something to you from her?”

“Ah precisely because it’s from her. I’ll abide by whatever you think of it.”

“I don’t understand,” said Kate. “What do you yourself think?” And then as he didn’t answer: “It seems to me I think you know. You have your instinct. You don’t need to read. It’s the proof.”

Densher faced her words as if they had been an accusation, an accusation for which he was prepared and which there was but one way to face. “I have indeed my instinct. It came to me, while I worried it out, last night. It came to me as an effect of the hour.” He held up his letter and seemed now to insist more than to confess. “This thing had been timed.”

“For Christmas Eve?”

“For Christmas Eve.”

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

Only meeting her eyes while he thought, he again didn’t reply. “What do you mean by the proof?”

“Why of the beauty with which you’ve been loved. But I won’t,” she said, “break your seal.”

“You positively decline?”

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

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

“That she announces to you she has made you rich.”

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

“Not all of it, no doubt, for it’s immense. But money to a large amount. I don’t care,” Kate went on, “to know how much.” And her strange smile recurred. “I trust her.”

“Did she tell you?” Densher asked.

“Never!” Kate visibly flushed at the thought. “That wouldn’t, on my part, have been playing fair with her. And I did,” she added, “play fair.”

Densher, who had believed her—he couldn’t help it—continued, holding his letter, to face her. He was much quieter now, as if his torment had somehow passed. “You played fair with me, Kate; and that’s why—since we talk of proofs—I want to give you one. I’ve wanted to let you see—and in preference even to myself—something I feel as sacred.”

She frowned a little. “I don’t understand.”

“I’ve asked myself for a tribute, for a sacrifice by which I can peculiarly recognise—”

“Peculiarly recognise what?” she demanded as he dropped.

“The admirable nature of your own sacrifice. You were capable in Venice of an act of splendid generosity.”

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

He made a movement. “It’s all I can do as a symbol of my attitude.”

She looked at him long. “Your attitude, my dear, is that you’re afraid of yourself. You’ve had to take yourself in hand. You’ve had to do yourself violence.”

“So it is then you meet me?”

She bent her eyes hard a moment to the letter, from which her hand still stayed itself. “You absolutely desire me to take it?”

“I absolutely desire you to take it.”

“To do what I like with it?”

“Short of course of making known its terms. It must remain—pardon my making the point—between you and me.”

She had a last hesitation, but she presently broke it. “Trust me.” Taking from him the sacred script she held it a little while her eyes again rested on those fine characters of Milly’s that they had shortly before discussed. “To hold it,” she brought out, “is to know.”

“Oh I know!” said Merton Densher.

“Well then if we both do—!” She had already turned to the fire, nearer to which she had moved, and with a quick gesture had jerked the thing into the flame. He started—but only half—as to undo her action: his arrest was as prompt as the latter had been decisive. He only watched, with her, the paper burn; after which their eyes again met. “You’ll have it all,” Kate said, “from New York.”

It was after he had in fact, two months later, heard from New York that she paid him a visit one morning at his own quarters—coming not as she had come in Venice, under his extreme solicitation, but as a need recognised in the first instance by herself, even though also as the prompt result of a missive delivered to her. This had consisted of a note from Densher accompanying a letter, “just to hand,” addressed him by an eminent American legal firm, a firm of whose high character he had become conscious while in New York as of a thing in the air itself, and whose head and front, the principal executor of Milly Theale’s copious will, had been duly identified at Lancaster Gate as the gentleman hurrying out, by the straight southern course, before the girl’s death, to the support of Mrs. Stringham. Densher’s act on receipt of the document in question—an act as to which and to the bearings of which his resolve had had time to mature—constituted in strictness, singularly enough, the first reference to Milly, or to what Milly might or might not have done, that had passed between our pair since they had stood together watching the destruction, in the little vulgar grate at Chelsea, of the undisclosed work of her hand. They had at the time, and in due deference now, on his part, to Kate’s mention of her responsibility for his call, immediately separated, and when they met again the subject was made present to them—at all events till some flare of new light—only by the intensity with which it mutely expressed its absence. They were not moreover in these weeks to meet often, in spite of the fact that this had, during January and a part of February, actually become for them a comparatively easy matter. Kate’s stay at Mrs. Condrip’s prolonged itself under allowances from her aunt which would have been a mystery to Densher had he not been admitted, at Lancaster Gate, really in spite of himself, to the esoteric view of them. “It’s her idea,” Mrs. Lowder had there said to him as if she really despised ideas—which she didn’t; “and I’ve taken up with my own, which is to give her her head till she has had enough of it. She has had enough of it, she had that soon enough; but as she’s as proud as the deuce she’ll come back when she has found some reason—having nothing in common with her disgust—of which she can make a show. She calls it her holiday, which she’s spending in her own way—the holiday to which, once a year or so, as she says, the very maids in the scullery have a right. So we’re taking it on that basis. But we shall not soon, I think, take another of the same sort. Besides, she’s quite decent; she comes often—whenever I make her a sign; and she has been good, on the whole, this year or two, so that, to be decent myself, I don’t complain. She has really been, poor dear, very much what one hoped; though I needn’t, you know,” Aunt Maud wound up, “tell you, after all, you clever creature, what that was.”

It had been partly in truth to keep down the opportunity for this that Densher’s appearances under the good lady’s roof markedly, after Christmas, interspaced themselves. The phase of his situation that on his return from Venice had made them for a short time almost frequent was at present quite obscured, and with it the impulse that had then acted. Another phase had taken its place, which he would have been painfully at a loss as yet to name or otherwise set on its feet, but of which the steadily rising tide left Mrs. Lowder, for his desire, quite high and dry. There had been a moment when it seemed possible that Mrs. Stringham, returning to America under convoy, would pause in London on her way and be housed with her old friend; in which case he was prepared for some apparent zeal of attendance. But this danger passed—he had felt it a danger, and the person in the world whom he would just now have most valued seeing on his own terms sailed away westward from Genoa. He thereby only wrote to her, having broken, in this respect, after Milly’s death, the silence as to the sense of which, before that event, their agreement had been so deep. She had answered him from Venice twice, and had had time to answer him twice again from New York. The last letter of her four had come by the same post as the document he sent on to Kate, but he hadn’t gone into the question of also enclosing that. His correspondence with Milly’s companion was somehow already presenting itself to him as a feature—as a factor, he would have said in his newspaper—of the time whatever it might be, long or short, in store for him; but one of his acutest current thoughts was apt to be devoted to his not having yet mentioned it to Kate. She had put him no question, no “Don’t you ever hear?”—so that he hadn’t been brought to the point. This he described to himself as a mercy, for he liked his secret. It was as a secret that, in the same personal privacy, he described his transatlantic commerce, scarce even wincing while he recognised it as the one connection in which he wasn’t straight. He had in fact for this connection a vivid mental image—he saw it as a small emergent rock in the waste of waters, the bottomless grey expanse of straightness. The fact that he had on several recent occasions taken with Kate an out-of-the-way walk that was each time to define itself as more remarkable for what they didn’t say than for what they did—this fact failed somehow to mitigate for him a strange consciousness of exposure. There was something deep within him that he had absolutely shown to no one—to the companion of these walks in particular not a bit more than he could help; but he was none the less haunted, under its shadow, with a dire apprehension of publicity. It was as if he had invoked that ugliness in some stupid good faith; and it was queer enough that on his emergent rock, clinging to it and to Susan Shepherd, he should figure himself as hidden from view. That represented no doubt his belief in her power, or in her delicate disposition to protect him. Only Kate at all events knew—what Kate did know, and she was also the last person interested to tell it; in spite of which it was as if his act, so deeply associated with her and never to be recalled nor recovered, was abroad on the winds of the world. His honesty, as he viewed it with Kate, was the very element of that menace: to the degree that he saw at moments, as to their final impulse or their final remedy, the need to bury in the dark blindness of each other’s arms the knowledge of each other that they couldn’t undo.

Save indeed that the sense in which it was in these days a question of arms was limited, this might have been the intimate expedient to which they were actually resorting. It had its value, in conditions that made everything count, that thrice over, in Battersea Park—where Mrs. Lowder now never drove—he had adopted the usual means, in sequestered alleys, of holding her close to his side. She could make absences, on her present footing, without having too inordinately to account for them at home—which was exactly what gave them for the first time an appreciable margin. He supposed she could always say in Chelsea—though he didn’t press it—that she had been across the town, in decency, for a look at her aunt; whereas there had always been reasons at Lancaster Gate for her not being able to plead the look at her other relatives. It was therefore between them a freedom of a purity as yet untasted; which for that matter also they made in various ways no little show of cherishing as such. They made the show indeed in every way but the way of a large use—an inconsequence that they almost equally gave time to helping each other to regard as natural. He put it to his companion that the kind of favour he now enjoyed at Lancaster Gate, the wonderful warmth of his reception there, cut in a manner the ground from under their feet. He was too horribly trusted—they had succeeded too well. He couldn’t in short make appointments with her without abusing Aunt Maud, and he couldn’t on the other hand haunt that lady without tying his hands. Kate saw what he meant just as he saw what she did when she admitted that she was herself, to a degree scarce less embarrassing, in the enjoyment of Aunt Maud’s confidence. It was special at present—she was handsomely used; she confessed accordingly to a scruple about misapplying her licence. Mrs. Lowder then finally had found—and all unconsciously now—the way to baffle them. It wasn’t however that they didn’t meet a little, none the less, in the southern quarter, to point for their common benefit the moral of their defeat. They crossed the river; they wandered in neighbourhoods sordid and safe; the winter was mild, so that, mounting to the top of trams, they could rumble together to Clapham or to Greenwich. If at the same time their minutes had never been so counted it struck Densher that by a singular law their tone—he scarce knew what to call it—had never been so bland. Not to talk of what they might have talked of drove them to other ground; it was as if they used a perverse insistence to make up what they ignored. They concealed their pursuit of the irrelevant by the charm of their manner; they took precautions for the courtesy they had formerly left to come of itself; often, when he had quitted her, he stopped short, walking off, with the aftersense of their change. He would have described their change—had he so far faced it as to describe it—by their being so damned civil. That had even, with the intimate, the familiar at the point to which they had brought them, a touch almost of the droll. What danger had there ever been of their becoming rude—after each had long since made the other so tremendously tender? Such were the things he asked himself when he wondered what in particular he most feared.

Yet all the while too the tension had its charm—such being the interest of a creature who could bring one back to her by such different roads. It was her talent for life again; which found in her a difference for the differing time. She didn’t give their tradition up; she but made of it something new. Frankly moreover she had never been more agreeable nor in a way—to put it prosaically—better company: he felt almost as if he were knowing her on that defined basis—which he even hesitated whether to measure as reduced or as extended; as if at all events he were admiring her as she was probably admired by people she met “out.” He hadn’t in fine reckoned that she would still have something fresh for him; yet this was what she had—that on the top of a tram in the Borough he felt as if he were next her at dinner. What a person she would be if they had been rich—with what a genius for the so-called great life, what a presence for the so-called great house, what a grace for the so-called great positions! He might regret at once, while he was about it, that they weren’t princes or billionaires. She had treated him on their Christmas to a softness that had struck him at the time as of the quality of fine velvet, meant to fold thick, but stretched a little thin; at present, however, she gave him the impression of a contact multitudinous as only the superficial can be. She had throughout never a word for what went on at home. She came out of that and she returned to it, but her nearest reference was the look with which, each time, she bade him goodbye. The look was her repeated prohibition: “It’s what I have to see and to know—so don’t touch it. That but wakes up the old evil, which I keep still, in my way, by sitting by it. I go now—leave me alone!—to sit by it again. The way to pity me—if that’s what you want—is to believe in me. If we could really do anything it would be another matter.”

He watched her, when she went her way, with the vision of what she thus a little stiffly carried. It was confused and obscure, but how, with her head high, it made her hold herself! He really in his own person might at these moments have been swaying a little aloft as one of the objects in her poised basket. It was doubtless thanks to some such consciousness as this that he felt the lapse of the weeks, before the day of Kate’s mounting of his stair, almost swingingly rapid. They contained for him the contradiction that, whereas periods of waiting are supposed in general to keep the time slow, it was the wait, actually, that made the pace trouble him. The secret of that anomaly, to be plain, was that he was aware of how, while the days melted, something rare went with them. This something was only a thought, but a thought precisely of such freshness and such delicacy as made the precious, of whatever sort, most subject to the hunger of time. The thought was all his own, and his intimate companion was the last person he might have shared it with. He kept it back like a favourite pang; left it behind him, so to say, when he went out, but came home again the sooner for the certainty of finding it there. Then he took it out of its sacred corner and its soft wrappings; he undid them one by one, handling them, handling it, as a father, baffled and tender, might handle a maimed child. But so it was before him—in his dread of who else might see it. Then he took to himself at such hours, in other words, that he should never, never know what had been in Milly’s letter. The intention announced in it he should but too probably know; only that would have been, but for the depths of his spirit, the least part of it. The part of it missed forever was the turn she would have given her act. This turn had possibilities that, somehow, by wondering about them, his imagination had extraordinarily filled out and refined. It had made of them a revelation the loss of which was like the sight of a priceless pearl cast before his eyes—his pledge given not to save it—into the fathomless sea, or rather even it was like the sacrifice of something sentient and throbbing, something that, for the spiritual ear, might have been audible as a faint far wail. This was the sound he cherished when alone in the stillness of his rooms. He sought and guarded the stillness, so that it might prevail there till the inevitable sounds of life, once more, comparatively coarse and harsh, should smother and deaden it—doubtless by the same process with which they would officiously heal the ache in his soul that was somehow one with it. It moreover deepened the sacred hush that he couldn’t complain. He had given poor Kate her freedom.

The great and obvious thing, as soon as she stood there on the occasion we have already named, was that she was now in high possession of it. This would have marked immediately the difference—had there been nothing else to do it—between their actual terms and their other terms, the character of their last encounter in Venice. That had been his idea, whereas her present step was her own; the few marks they had in common were, from the first moment, to his conscious vision, almost pathetically plain. She was as grave now as before; she looked around her, to hide it, as before; she pretended, as before, in an air in which her words at the moment itself fell flat, to an interest in the place and a curiosity about his “things”; there was a recall in the way in which, after she had failed a little to push up her veil symmetrically and he had said she had better take it off altogether, she had acceded to his suggestion before the glass. It was just these things that were vain; and what was real was that his fancy figured her after the first few minutes as literally now providing the element of reassurance which had previously been his care. It was she, supremely, who had the presence of mind. She made indeed for that matter very prompt use of it. “You see I’ve not hesitated this time to break your seal.”

She had laid on the table from the moment of her coming in the long envelope, substantially filled, which he had sent her enclosed in another of still ampler make. He had however not looked at it—his belief being that he wished never again to do so; besides which it had happened to rest with its addressed side up. So he “saw” nothing, and it was only into her eyes that her remark made him look, declining any approach to the object indicated. “It’s not ‘my’ seal, my dear; and my intention—which my note tried to express—was all to treat it to you as not mine.”

“Do you mean that it’s to that extent mine then?”

“Well, let us call it, if we like, theirs—that of the good people in New York, the authors of our communication. If the seal is broken well and good; but we might, you know,” he presently added, “have sent it back to them intact and inviolate. Only accompanied,” he smiled with his heart in his mouth, “by an absolutely kind letter.”

Kate took it with the mere brave blink with which a patient of courage signifies to the exploring medical hand that the tender place is touched. He saw on the spot that she was prepared, and with this signal sign that she was too intelligent not to be, came a flicker of possibilities. She was—merely to put it at that—intelligent enough for anything. “Is it what you’re proposing we should do?”

“Ah it’s too late to do it—well, ideally. Now, with that sign that we know—!”

“But you don’t know,” she said very gently.

“I refer,” he went on without noticing it, “to what would have been the handsome way. Its being dispatched again, with no cognisance taken but one’s assurance of the highest consideration, and the proof of this in the state of the envelope—that would have been really satisfying.”

She thought an instant. “The state of the envelope proving refusal, you mean, not to be based on the insufficiency of the sum?”

Densher smiled again as for the play, however whimsical, of her humour. “Well yes—something of that sort.”

“So that if cognisance has been taken—so far as I’m concerned—it spoils the beauty?”

“It makes the difference that I’m disappointed in the hope—which I confess I entertained—that you’d bring the thing back to me as you had received it.”

“You didn’t express that hope in your letter.”

“I didn’t want to. I wanted to leave it to yourself. I wanted—oh yes, if that’s what you wish to ask me—to see what you’d do.”

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

He continued steady now; a kind of ease—from the presence, as in the air, of something he couldn’t yet have named—had come to him. “Well, I wanted—in so good a case—to test you.”

She was struck—it showed in her face—by his expression. “It is a good case. I doubt whether a better,” she said with her eyes on him, “has ever been known.”

“The better the case then the better the test!”

“How do you know,” she asked in reply to this, “what I’m capable of?”

“I don’t, my dear! Only with the seal unbroken I should have known sooner.”

“I see”—she took it in. “But I myself shouldn’t have known at all. And you wouldn’t have known, either, what I do know.”

“Let me tell you at once,” he returned, “that if you’ve been moved to correct my ignorance I very particularly request you not to.”

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

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

“Why the only thing in the world that I take you as thinking of. Not accepting—what she has done. Isn’t there some regular name in such cases? Not taking up the bequest.”

“There’s something you forget in it,” he said after a moment. “My asking you to join with me in doing so.”

Her wonder but made her softer, yet at the same time didn’t make her less firm. “How can I ‘join’ in a matter with which I’ve nothing to do?”

“How? By a single word.”

“And what word?”

“Your consent to my giving up.”

“My consent has no meaning when I can’t prevent you.”

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

She seemed to face a threat in it. “You mean you won’t give up if I don’t consent?”

“Yes. I do nothing.”

“That, as I understand, is accepting.”

Densher paused. “I do nothing formal.”

“You won’t, I suppose you mean, touch the money.”

“I won’t touch the money.”

It had a sound—though he had been coming to it—that made for gravity. “Who then in such an event will?”

“Anyone who wants or who can.”

Again a little she said nothing: she might say too much. But by the time she spoke he had covered ground. “How can I touch it but through you?”

“You can’t. Any more,” he added, “than I can renounce it except through you.”

“Oh ever so much less! There’s nothing,” she explained, “in my power.”

“I’m in your power,” Merton Densher said.

“In what way?”

“In the way I show—and the way I’ve always shown. When have I shown,” he asked as with a sudden cold impatience, “anything else? You surely must feel—so that you needn’t wish to appear to spare me in it—how you ‘have’ me.”

“It’s very good of you, my dear,” she nervously laughed, “to put me so thoroughly up to it!”

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

It had come to the point really that they showed each other pale faces, and that all the unspoken between them looked out of their eyes in a dim terror of their further conflict. Something even rose between them in one of their short silences—something that was like an appeal from each to the other not to be too true. Their necessity was somehow before them, but which of them must meet it first? “Thank you!” Kate said for his word about her freedom, but taking for the minute no further action on it. It was blest at least that all ironies failed them, and during another slow moment their very sense of it cleared the air.

There was an effect of this in the way he soon went on. “You must intensely feel that it’s the thing for which we worked together.”

She took up the remark, however, no more than if it were commonplace; she was already again occupied with a point of her own. “Is it absolutely true—for if it is, you know, it’s tremendously interesting—that you haven’t so much as a curiosity about what she has done for you?”

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

“No—but I don’t understand. It seems to me in your place—!”

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

She had in an instant nevertheless a curious thought. “But won’t the facts be published?”

“ ‘Published’?”—he winced.

“I mean won’t you see them in the papers?”

“Ah never! I shall know how to escape that.”

It seemed to settle the subject, but she had the next minute another insistence. “Your desire is to escape everything?”

“Everything.”

“And do you need no more definite sense of what it is you ask me to help you to renounce?”

“My sense is sufficient without being definite. I’m willing to believe that the amount of money’s not small.”

“Ah there you are!” she exclaimed.

“If she was to leave me a remembrance,” he quietly pursued, “it would inevitably not be meagre.”

Kate waited as for how to say it. “It’s worthy of her. It’s what she was herself—if you remember what we once said that was.”

He hesitated—as if there had been many things. But he remembered one of them. “Stupendous?”

“Stupendous.” A faint smile for it—ever so small—had flickered in her face, but had vanished before the omen of tears, a little less uncertain, had shown themselves in his own. His eyes filled—but that made her continue. She continued gently. “I think that what it really is must be that you’re afraid. I mean,” she explained, “that you’re afraid of all the truth. If you’re in love with her without it, what indeed can you be more? And you’re afraid—it’s wonderful!—to be in love with her.”

“I never was in love with her,” said Densher.

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

“They cover us,” Densher said.

“That’s what I give you,” Kate gravely wound up. “That’s what I’ve done for you.”

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

“That I do consent?” She gravely shook her head. “No—for I see. You’ll marry me without the money; you won’t marry me with it. If I don’t consent you don’t.”

“You lose me?” He showed, though naming it frankly, a sort of awe of her high grasp. “Well, you lose nothing else. I make over to you every penny.”

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

“You must choose.”

Strange it was for him then that she stood in his own rooms doing it, while, with an intensity now beyond any that had ever made his breath come slow, he waited for her act. “There’s but one thing that can save you from my choice.”

“From your choice of my surrender to you?”

“Yes”—and she gave a nod at the long envelope on the table—“your surrender of that.”

“What is it then?”

“Your word of honour that you’re not in love with her memory.”

“Oh—her memory!”

“Ah”—she made a high gesture—“don’t speak of it as if you couldn’t be. I could in your place; and you’re one for whom it will do. Her memory’s your love. You want no other.”

He heard her out in stillness, watching her face but not moving. Then he only said: “I’ll marry you, mind you, in an hour.”

“As we were?”

“As we were.”

But she turned to the door, and her headshake was now the end. “We shall never be again as we were!”