"Well, I do judge. Mrs. Lowder will have done so too--only _she_, poor
lady, wrong. Miss Croy's refusal of him will have struck him"--Densher
continued to make it out--"as a phenomenon requiring a reason."
"And you've been clear to him _as_ the reason?"
"Not too clear--since I'm sticking here and since that has been a fact
to make his descent on Miss Theale relevant. But clear enough. He has
believed," said Densher bravely, "that I may have been a reason at
Lancaster Gate, and yet at the same time have been up to something in
Venice."
Mrs. Stringham took her courage from his own. "'Up to' something? Up to
what?"
"God knows. To some 'game,' as they say. To some deviltry. To some
duplicity."
"Which of course," Mrs. Stringham observed, "is a monstrous
supposition." Her companion, after a stiff minute--sensibly long for
each--fell away from her again, and then added to it another minute,
which he spent once more looking out with his hands in his pockets.
This was no answer, he perfectly knew, to what she had dropped, and it
even seemed to state for his own ears that no answer was possible. She
left him to himself, and he was glad she had declined, for their
further colloquy, the advantage of lights. These would have been an
advantage mainly to herself. Yet she got her benefit too even from the
absence of them. It came out in her very tone when at last she
addressed him--so differently, for confidence--in words she had already
used. "If Sir Luke himself asks it of you as something you can do for
_him_, will you deny to Milly herself what she has been made so
dreadfully to believe?"
Oh how he knew he hung back! But at last he said: "You're absolutely
certain then that she does believe it?"
"Certain?" She appealed to their whole situation. "Judge!"