She had a smile that was apparently for his tone. "You're old
enough--with plenty of Mrs. Stringham."
Nothing might have been so odd for him now, could he have measured it,
as his being able to feel, quite while he drew from her these
successive cues, that he was essentially "seeing what she would
say"--an instinct compatible for him therefore with that absence of a
need to know her better to which she had a moment before done
injustice. If it hadn't been appearing to him in gleams that she would
somewhere break down, he probably couldn't have gone on. Still, as she
wasn't breaking down there was nothing for him but to continue. "Is
your going Mrs. Lowder's idea?"
"Very much indeed. Of course again you see what it does for us. And I
don't," she added, "refer only to our going, but to Aunt Maud's view of
the general propriety of it."
"I see again, as you say," Densher said after a moment. "It makes
everything fit."
"Everything."
The word, for a little, held the air, and he might have seemed the
while to be looking, by no means dimly now, at all it stood for. But he
had in fact been looking at something else. "You leave her here then to
die?"
"Ah she believes she won't die. Not if you stay. I mean," Kate
explained, "Aunt Maud believes."
"And that's all that's necessary?"
Still indeed she didn't break down. "Didn't we long ago agree that what
she believes is the principal thing for us?"
He recalled it, under her eyes, but it came as from long ago. "Oh yes.
I can't deny it." Then he added: "So that if I stay--"
"It won't"--she was prompt--"be our fault."
"If Mrs. Lowder still, you mean, suspects us?"
"If she still suspects us. But she won't."
Kate gave it an emphasis that might have appeared to leave him nothing
more; and he might in fact well have found nothing if he hadn't
presently found: "But what if she doesn't accept me?"
It produced in her a look of weariness that made the patience of her
tone the next moment touch him. "You can but try."
"Naturally I can but try. Only, you see, one has to try a little hard
to propose to a dying girl."
"She isn't for you as if she's dying." It had determined in Kate the
flash of _justesse_ he could perhaps most, on consideration, have
admired, since her retort touched the truth. There before him was the
fact of how Milly to-night impressed him, and his companion, with her
eyes in his own and pursuing his impression to the depths of them,
literally now perched on the fact in triumph. She turned her head to
where their friend was again in range, and it made him turn his, so
that they watched a minute in concert. Milly, from the other side,
happened at the moment to notice them, and she sent across toward them
in response all the candour of her smile, the lustre of her pearls, the
value of her life, the essence of her wealth. It brought them together
again with faces made fairly grave by the reality she put into their
plan. Kate herself grew a little pale for it, and they had for a time
only a silence. The music, however, gay and vociferous, had broken out
afresh and protected more than interrupted them. When Densher at last
spoke it was under cover.
"I might stay, you know, without trying."
"Oh to stay _is_ to try."
"To have for herself, you mean, the appearance of it?"
"I don't see how you can have the appearance more."