"Not what you said?" she asked in a wonder. "You're not writing?"
He already felt relieved. "I don't know, upon my honour, what I'm
doing."
It made her visibly grave; so that, disconcerted in another way, he was
afraid of what she would see in it. She saw in fact exactly what he
feared, but again his honour, as he called it, was saved even while she
didn't know she had threatened it. Taking his words for a betrayal of
the sense that he, on his side, _might_ complain, what she clearly
wanted was to urge on him some such patience as he should be perhaps
able to arrive at with her indirect help. Still more clearly, however,
she wanted to be sure of how far she might venture; and he could see
her make out in a moment that she had a sort of test.
"Then if it's not for your book--?"
"What _am_ I staying for?"
"I mean with your London work--with all you have to do. Isn't it rather
empty for you?"
"Empty for me?" He remembered how Kate had held that she might propose
marriage, and he wondered if this were the way she would naturally
begin it. It would leave him, such an incident, he already felt, at a
loss, and the note of his finest anxiety might have been in the
vagueness of his reply. "Oh well--!"
"I ask too many questions?" She settled it for herself before he could
protest. "You stay because you've got to."
He grasped at it. "I stay because I've got to." And he couldn't have
said when he had uttered it if it were loyal to Kate or disloyal. It
gave her, in a manner, away; it showed the tip of the ear of her plan.
Yet Milly took it, he perceived, but as a plain statement of his truth.
He was waiting for what Kate would have told her of--the permission
from Lancaster Gate to come any nearer. To remain friends with either
niece or aunt he mustn't stir without it. All this Densher read in the
girl's sense of the spirit of his reply; so that it made him feel he
was lying, and he had to think of something to correct that. What he
thought of was, in an instant, "Isn't it enough, whatever may be one's
other complications, to stay after all for _you?_"
"Oh you must judge."
He was by this time on his feet to take leave, and was also at last too
restless. The speech in question at least wasn't disloyal to Kate; that
was the very tone of their bargain. So was it, by being loyal, another
kind of lie, the lie of the uncandid profession of a motive. He was
staying so little "for" Milly that he was staying positively against
her. He didn't, none the less, know, and at last, thank goodness,
didn't care. The only thing he could say might make it either better or
worse. "Well then, so long as I don't go, you must think of me all _as_
judging!"