"My dear girl, you simplify"--and he was now serious enough. "It isn't
so simple even as that."
She had the air of thinking what it then might be. "I of course can't,
with no clue, know what it is." She remained none the less patient and
still. "If at such a moment she could write you one's inevitably quite
at sea. One doesn't, with the best will in the world, understand." And
then as Densher had a pause which might have stood for all the involved
explanation that, to his discouragement, loomed before him: "You
_haven't_ decided what to do."
She had said it very gently, almost sweetly, and he didn't instantly
say otherwise. But he said so after a look at her. "Oh yes--I have.
Only with this sight of you here and what I seem to see in it for
you--!" And his eyes, as at suggestions that pressed, turned from one
part of the room to another.
"Horrible place, isn't it?" said Kate.
It brought him straight back to his enquiry. "Is it for anything awful
you've had to come?"
"Oh that will take as long to tell you as anything _you_ may have.
Don't mind," she continued, "the 'sight of me here,' nor
whatever--which is more than I yet know myself--may be 'in it' for me.
And kindly consider too that, after all, if you're in trouble I can a
little wish to help you. Perhaps I can absolutely even do it."
"My dear child, it's just because of the sense of your wish--! I
suppose I'm in trouble--I suppose that's it." He said this with so odd
a suddenness of simplicity that she could only stare for it--which he
as promptly saw. So he turned off as he could his vagueness. "And yet I
oughtn't to be." Which sounded indeed vaguer still.
She waited a moment. "Is it, as you say for my own business, anything
very awful?"
"Well," he slowly replied, "you'll tell me if you find it so. I mean if
you find my idea--"
He was so slow that she took him up. "Awful?" A sound of
impatience--the form of a laugh--at last escaped her. "I can't find it
anything at all till I know what you're talking about."
It brought him then more to the point, though it did so at first but by
making him, on the hearthrug before her, with his hands in his pockets,
turn awhile to and fro. There rose in him even with this movement a
recall of another time--the hour in Venice, the hour of gloom and
storm, when Susan Shepherd had sat in his quarters there very much as
Kate was sitting now, and he had wondered, in pain even as now, what he
might say and mightn't. Yet the present occasion after all was somehow
the easier. He tried at any rate to attach that feeling to it while he
stopped before his companion. "The communication I speak of can't
possibly belong--so far as its date is concerned--to these last days.
The postmark, which is legible, does; but it isn't thinkable, for
anything else, that she wrote--!" He dropped, looking at her as if
she'd understand.
It was easy to understand. "On her deathbed?" But Kate took an
instant's thought. "Aren't we agreed that there was never any one in
the world like her?"
"Yes." And looking over her head he spoke clearly enough. "There was
never any one in the world like her."
Kate, from her chair, always without a movement, raised her eyes to the
unconscious reach of his own. Then when the latter again dropped to her
she added a question. "And won't it further depend a little on what the
communication is?"
"A little perhaps--but not much. It's a communication," said Densher.
"Do you mean a letter?"
"Yes, a letter. Addressed to me in her hand--in hers unmistakeably."