It just pulled her friend up, for even while they talked--at least it
was one of the reasons--she stood there suddenly, irrelevantly, in the
light of her _other_ identity, the identity she would have for Mr.
Densher. This was always, from one instant to another, an incalculable
light, which, though it might go off faster than it came on,
necessarily disturbed. It sprang, with a perversity all its own, from
the fact that, with the lapse of hours and days, the chances themselves
that made for his being named continued so oddly to fail. There were
twenty, there were fifty, but none of them turned up. This, in
particular, was of course not a juncture at which the least of them
would naturally be present; but it would make, none the less, Milly
saw, another day practically all stamped with avoidance. She saw in a
quick glimmer, and with it all Kate's unconsciousness; and then she
shook off the obsession. But it had lasted long enough to qualify her
response. No, she had shown Kate how she trusted her; and that, for
loyalty, would somehow do. "Oh, dear thing, now that the ice is broken
I shan't trouble _you_ again."
"You'll come alone?"
"Without a scruple. Only I shall ask you, please, for your absolute
discretion still."
Outside, before the door, on the wide pavement of the great square,
they had to wait again while their carriage, which Milly had kept,
completed a further turn of exercise, engaged in by the coachman for
reasons of his own. The footman was there, and had indicated that he
was making the circuit; so Kate went on while they stood. "But don't
you ask a good deal, darling, in proportion to what you give?"
This pulled Milly up still shorter--so short in fact that she yielded
as soon as she had taken it in. But she continued to smile. "I see.
Then you _can_ tell."
"I don't want to 'tell,'" said Kate. "I'll be as silent as the tomb if
I can only have the truth from you. All I want is that you shouldn't
keep from me how you find out that you really are."
"Well then, I won't, ever. But you see for yourself," Milly went on,
"how I really am. I'm satisfied. I'm happy."
Kate looked at her long. "I believe you like it. The way things turn
out for you----!"
Milly met her look now without a thought of anything but the spoken.
She had ceased to be Mr. Densher's image; she was all her own memento
and she was none the less fine. Still, still, what had passed was a
fair bargain, and it would do. "Of course I like it. I feel--I can't
otherwise describe it--as if I had been, on my knees, to the priest.
I've confessed and I've been absolved. It has been lifted off."