II

It was extraordinary enough that he should actually be finding himself,

when Thursday arrived, none so wide of the mark. Kate hadn't come all

the way to this for him, but she had come to a good deal by the end of

a quarter of an hour. What she had begun with was her surprise at her

appearing to have left him on Tuesday anything more to understand. The

parts, as he now saw, under her hand, did fall more or less together,

and it wasn't even as if she had spent the interval in twisting and

fitting them. She was bright and handsome, not fagged and worn, with

the general clearness; for it certainly stuck out enough that if the

American ladies themselves weren't to be squared, which was absurd,

they fairly imposed the necessity of trying Aunt Maud again. One

couldn't say to them, kind as she had been to them: "We'll meet,

please, whenever you'll let us, at your house; but we count on you to

help us to keep it secret." They must in other terms inevitably speak

to Aunt Maud--it would be of the last awkwardness to ask them not to:

Kate had embraced all this in her choice of speaking first. What Kate

embraced altogether was indeed wonderful to-day for Densher, though he

perhaps struck himself rather as getting it out of her piece by piece

than as receiving it in a steady light. He had always felt, however,

that the more he asked of her the more he found her prepared, as he

imaged it, to hand out. He had said to her more than once even before

his absence: "You keep the key of the cupboard, and I foresee that when

we're married you'll dole me out my sugar by lumps." She had replied

that she rejoiced in his assumption that sugar would be his diet, and

the domestic arrangement so prefigured might have seemed already to

prevail. The supply from the cupboard at this hour was doubtless, of a

truth, not altogether cloyingly sweet; but it met in a manner his

immediate requirements. If her explanations at any rate prompted

questions the questions no more exhausted them than they exhausted her

patience. And they were naturally, of the series, the simpler; as for

instance in his taking it from her that Miss Theale then could do

nothing for them. He frankly brought out what he had ventured to think

possible. "If we can't meet here and we've really exhausted the charms

of the open air and the crowd, some such little raft in the wreck, some

occasional opportunity like that of Tuesday, has been present to me

these two days as better than nothing. But if our friends are so

accountable to this house of course there's no more to be said. And

it's one more nail, thank God, in the coffin of our odious delay." He

was but too glad without more ado to point the moral. "Now I hope you

see we can't work it anyhow."

If she laughed for this--and her spirits seemed really high--it was

because of the opportunity that, at the hotel, he had most shown

himself as enjoying. "Your idea's beautiful when one remembers that you

hadn't a word except for Milly." But she was as beautifully

good-humoured. "You might of course get used to her--you _will._ You're

quite right--so long as they're with us or near us." And she put it,

lucidly, that the dear things couldn't _help_, simply as charming

friends, giving them a lift. "They'll speak to Aunt Maud, but they

won't shut their doors to us: that would be another matter. A friend

always helps--and she's a friend." She had left Mrs. Stringham by this

time out of the question; she had reduced it to Milly. "Besides, she

particularly likes us. She particularly likes _you_. I say, old boy,

make something of that." He felt her dodging the ultimatum he had just

made sharp, his definite reminder of how little, at the best, they

could work it; but there were certain of his remarks--those mostly of

the sharper penetration--that it had been quite her practice from the

first not formally, not reverently to notice. She showed the effect of

them in ways less trite. This was what happened now: he didn't think in

truth that she wasn't really minding. She took him up, none the less,

on a minor question. "You say we can't meet here, but you see it's just

what we do. What could be more lovely than this?"

It wasn't to torment him--that again he didn't believe; but he had to

come to the house in some discomfort, so that he frowned a little at

her calling it thus a luxury. Wasn't there an element in it of coming

back into bondage? The bondage might be veiled and varnished, but he

knew in his bones how little the very highest privileges of Lancaster

Gate could ever be a sign of their freedom. They were upstairs, in one

of the smaller apartments of state, a room arranged as a boudoir, but

visibly unused--it defied familiarity--and furnished in the ugliest of

blues. He had immediately looked with interest at the closed doors, and

Kate had met his interest with the assurance that it was all right,

that Aunt Maud did them justice--so far, that was, as this particular

time was concerned; that they should be alone and have nothing to fear.

But the fresh allusion to this that he had drawn from her acted on him

now more directly, brought him closer still to the question. They

_were_ alone--it _was_ all right: he took in anew the shut doors and

the permitted privacy, the solid stillness of the great house. They

connected themselves on the spot with something made doubly vivid in

him by the whole present play of her charming strong will. What it

amounted to was that he couldn't have her--hanged if he

could!--evasive. He couldn't and he wouldn't--wouldn't have her

inconvenient and elusive. He didn't want her deeper than himself, fine

as it might be as wit or as character; he wanted to keep her where

their communications would be straight and easy and their intercourse

independent. The effect of this was to make him say in a moment: "Will

you take me just as I am?"

She turned a little pale for the tone of truth in it--which qualified

to his sense delightfully the strength of her will; and the pleasure he

found in this was not the less for her breaking out after an instant

into a strain that stirred him more than any she had ever used with

him. "Ah do let me try myself! I assure you I see my way--so don't

spoil it: wait for me and give me time. Dear man," Kate said, "only

believe in me, and it will be beautiful."

He hadn't come back to hear her talk of his believing in her as if he

didn't; but he had come back--and it all was upon him now--to seize her

with a sudden intensity that her manner of pleading with him had made,

as happily appeared, irresistible. He laid strong hands upon her to

say, almost in anger, "Do you love me, love me, love me?" and she

closed her eyes as with the sense that he might strike her but that she

could gratefully take it. Her surrender was her response, her response

her surrender; and, though scarce hearing what she said, he so profited

by these things that it could for the time be ever so intimately

appreciable to him that he was keeping her. The long embrace in which

they held each other was the rout of evasion, and he took from it the

certitude that what she had from him was real to her. It was stronger

than an uttered vow, and the name he was to give it in afterthought was

that she had been sublimely sincere. _That_ was all he asked--sincerity

making a basis that would bear almost anything. This settled so much,

and settled it so thoroughly, that there was nothing left to ask her to

swear to. Oaths and vows apart, now they could talk. It seemed in fact

only now that their questions were put on the table. He had taken up

more expressly at the end of five minutes her plea for her own plan,

and it was marked that the difference made by the passage just enacted

was a difference in favour of her choice of means. Means had somehow

suddenly become a detail--her province and her care; it had grown more

consistently vivid that her intelligence was one with her passion. "I

certainly don't want," he said--and he could say it with a smile of

indulgence--"to be all the while bringing it up that I don't trust you."

"I should hope not! What do you think I want to do?"

He had really at this to make out a little what he thought, and the

first thing that put itself in evidence was of course the oddity, after

all, of their game, to which he could but frankly allude. "We're doing,

at the best, in trying to temporise in so special a way, a thing most

people would call us fools for." But his visit passed, all the same,

without his again attempting to make "just as he was" serve. He had no

more money just as he was than he had had just as he had been, or than

he should have, probably, when it came to that, just as he always would

be; whereas she, on her side, in comparison with her state of some

months before, had measureably more to relinquish. He easily saw how

their meeting at Lancaster Gate gave more of an accent to that quantity

than their meeting at stations or in parks; and yet on the other hand

he couldn't urge this against it. If Mrs. Lowder was indifferent her

indifference added in a manner to what Kate's taking him as he was

would call on her to sacrifice. Such in fine was her art with him that

she seemed to put the question of their still waiting into quite other

terms than the terms of ugly blue, of florid Sèvres, of complicated

brass, in which their boudoir expressed it. She said almost all in fact

by saying, on this article of Aunt Maud, after he had once more pressed

her, that when he should see her, as must inevitably soon happen, he

would understand. "Do you mean," he asked at this, "that there's any

_definite_ sign of her coming round? I'm not talking," he explained,

"of mere hypocrisies in her, or mere brave duplicities. Remember, after

all, that supremely clever as we are, and as strong a team, I admit, as

there is going--remember that she can play with us quite as much as we

play with her."

"She doesn't want to play with _me_, my dear," Kate lucidly replied;

"she doesn't want to make me suffer a bit more than she need. She cares

for me too much, and everything she does or doesn't do has a value.

_This_ has a value--her being as she has been about us to-day. I

believe she's in her room, where she's keeping strictly to herself

while you're here with me. But that isn't 'playing'--not a bit."

"What is it then," the young man returned--"from the moment it isn't

her blessing and a cheque?"

Kate was complete. "It's simply her absence of smallness. There is

something in her above trifles. She _generally_ trusts us; she doesn't

propose to hunt us into corners; and if we frankly ask for a

thing--why," said Kate, "she shrugs, but she lets it go. She has really

but one fault--she's indifferent, on such ground as she has taken about

us, to details. However," the girl cheerfully went on, "it isn't in

detail we fight her."

"It seems to me," Densher brought out after a moment's thought of this,

"that it's in detail we deceive her"--a speech that, as soon as he had

uttered it, applied itself for him, as also visibly for his companion,

to the afterglow of their recent embrace.

Any confusion attaching to this adventure, however, dropped from Kate,

whom, as he could see with sacred joy, it must take more than that to

make compunctious. "I don't say we can do it again. I mean," she

explained, "meet here."

Densher indeed had been wondering where they could do it again. If

Lancaster Gate was so limited that issue reappeared. "I mayn't come

back at all?"

"Certainly--to see her. It's she, really," his companion smiled, "who's

in love with you."

But it made him--a trifle more grave--look at her a moment. "Don't make

out, you know, that every one's in love with me."