"That doesn't matter. _She_ did by the time he had left her. Besides,"
Densher added, "he does know it. When," he continued, "did you last see
him?"
But she was lost now in the picture before her. "_That_ was what made
her worse?"
He watched her take it in--it so added to her sombre beauty. Then he
spoke as Mrs. Stringham had spoken. "She turned her face to the wall."
"Poor Milly!" said Kate.
Slight as it was, her beauty somehow gave it style; so that he
continued consistently: "She learned it, you see, too soon--since of
course one's idea had been that she might never even learn it at all.
And she _had_ felt sure--through everything we had done--of there not
being between us, so far at least as you were concerned, anything she
need regard as a warning."
She took another moment for thought. "It wasn't through anything _you_
did--whatever that may have been--that she gained her certainty. It was
by the conviction she got from me."
"Oh it's very handsome," Densher said, "for you to take your share!"
"Do you suppose," Kate asked, "that I think of denying it?"
Her look and her tone made him for the instant regret his comment,
which indeed had been the first that rose to his lips as an effect
absolutely of what they would have called between them her
straightness. Her straightness, visibly, was all his own loyalty could
ask. Still, that was comparatively beside the mark. "Of course I don't
suppose anything but that we're together in our recognitions, our
responsibilities--whatever we choose to call them. It isn't a question
for us of apportioning shares or distinguishing invidiously among such
impressions as it was our idea to give."
"It wasn't _your_ idea to give impressions," said Kate.
He met this with a smile that he himself felt, in its strained
character, as queer. "Don't go into that!"
It was perhaps not as going into it that she had another idea--an idea
born, she showed, of the vision he had just evoked. "Wouldn't it have
been possible then to deny the truth of the information? I mean of Lord
Mark's."