"How should I, my dear--in the absence of everything?" And he himself
stared as for light. "She's dead?" Then as with her eyes on him she
slowly shook her head he uttered a strange "Not yet?"
It came out in Kate's face that there were several questions on her
lips, but the one she presently put was: "Is it very terrible?"
"The manner of her so consciously and helplessly dying?" He had to
think a moment. "Well, yes--since you ask me: very terrible to _me_--so
far as, before I came away, I had any sight of it. But I don't think,"
he went on, "that--though I'll try--I _can_ quite tell you what it was,
what it is, for me. That's why I probably just sounded to you," he
explained, "as if I hoped it might be over."
She gave him her quietest attention, but he by this time saw that, so
far as telling her all was concerned, she would be divided between the
wish and the reluctance to hear it; between the curiosity that, not
unnaturally, would consume her and the opposing scruple of a respect
for misfortune. The more she studied him too--and he had never so felt
her closely attached to his face--the more the choice of an attitude
would become impossible to her. There would simply be a feeling
uppermost, and the feeling wouldn't be eagerness. This perception grew
in him fast, and he even, with his imagination, had for a moment the
quick forecast of her possibly breaking out at him, should he go too
far, with a wonderful: "What horrors are you telling me?" It would have
the sound--wouldn't it be open to him fairly to bring that out
himself?--of a repudiation, for pity and almost for shame, of
everything that in Venice had passed between them. Not that she would
confess to any return upon herself; not that she would let compunction
or horror give her away; but it was in the air for him--yes--that she
wouldn't want details, that she positively wouldn't take them, and
that, if he would generously understand it from her, she would prefer
to keep him down. Nothing, however, was more definite for him than that
at the same time he must remain down but so far as it suited him.
Something rose strong within him against his not being free with her.
She had been free enough about it all, three months before, with _him_.
That was what she was at present only in the sense of treating him
handsomely. "I can believe," she said with perfect consideration, "how
dreadful for you much of it must have been."
He didn't however take this up; there were things about which he wished
first to be clear. "There's no other possibility, by what you now know?
I mean for her life." And he had just to insist--she would say as
little as she could. "She _is_ dying?"
"She's dying."
It was strange to him, in the matter of Milly, that Lancaster Gate
could make him any surer; yet what in the world, in the matter of
Milly, wasn't strange? Nothing was so much so as his own behaviour--his
present as well as his past. He could but do as he must. "Has Sir Luke
Strett," he asked, "gone back to her?"
"I believe he's there now."
"Then," said Densher, "it's the end."
She took it in silence for whatever he deemed it to be; but she spoke
otherwise after a minute. "You won't know, unless you've perhaps seen
him yourself, that Aunt Maud has been to him."
"Oh!" Densher exclaimed, with nothing to add to it.
"For real news," Kate herself after an instant added.
"She hasn't thought Mrs. Stringham's real?"
"It's perhaps only I who haven't. It was on Aunt Maud's trying again
three days ago to see him that she heard at his house of his having
gone. He had started I believe some days before."
"And won't then by this time be back?"