"Well then, just as you like. I'll stay and do my best for you."
He saw she was sincere, was really giving him a chance; and that of
itself made things clearer. The feeling of how far he had gone came
back to him not in repentance, but in this very vision of an escape;
and it Was not of what he had done, but of what Kate offered, that he
now weighed the consequence. "Won't it make her--her not finding me
here--be rather more sure there's something between us?"
Kate thought. "Oh I don't know. It will of course greatly upset her.
But you needn't trouble about that. She won't die of it."
"Do you mean she _will?_" Densher presently asked.
"Don't put me questions when you don't believe what I say. You make too
many conditions."
She spoke now with a shade of rational weariness that made the want of
pliancy, the failure to oblige her, look poor and ugly; so that what it
suddenly came back to for him was his deficiency in the things a man of
any taste, so engaged, so enlisted, would have liked to make sure of
being able to show--imagination, tact, positively even humour. The
circumstance is doubtless odd, but the truth is none the less that the
speculation uppermost with him at this juncture was: "What if I should
begin to bore this creature?" And that, within a few seconds, had
translated itself. "If you'll swear again you love me--!"
She looked about, at door and window, as if he were asking for more
than he said. "Here? There's nothing between us here," Kate smiled.
"Oh _isn't_ there?" Her smile itself, with this, had so settled
something for him that he had come to her pleadingly and holding out
his hands, which she immediately seized with her own as if both to
check him and to keep him. It was by keeping him thus for a minute that
she did check him; she held him long enough, while, with their eyes
deeply meeting, they waited in silence for him to recover himself and
renew his discretion. He coloured as with a return of the sense of
where they were, and that gave her precisely one of her usual
victories, which immediately took further form. By the time he had
dropped her hands he had again taken hold, as it were, of Milly's. It
was not at any rate with Milly he had broken. "I'll do all you wish,"
he declared as if to acknowledge the acceptance of his condition that
he had practically, after all, drawn from her--a declaration on which
she then, recurring to her first idea, promptly acted.
"If you _are_ as good as that I go. You'll tell her that, finding you
with her, I wouldn't wait. Say that, you know, from yourself. She'll
understand."
She had reached the door with it--she was full of decision; but he had
before she left him one more doubt. "I don't see how she can understand
enough, you know, without understanding too much."
"You don't need to see."