"The first time after my return--the Sunday I came to you. What's he
doing," Densher went on, "at that hour of the morning with her? What
does his having been with her there mean?"
"Of whom are you talking?"
"Of that man--Lord Mark of course. What does it represent?"
"Oh with Aunt Maud?"
"Yes, my dear--and with you. It comes more or less to the same thing;
and it's what you didn't tell me the other day when I put you the
question."
Kate tried to remember the other day. "You asked me nothing about any
hour."
"I asked you when it was you last saw him--previous, I mean, to his
second descent at Venice. You wouldn't say, and as we were talking of a
matter comparatively more important I let it pass. But the fact
remains, you know, my dear, that you haven't told me."
Two things in this speech appeared to have reached Kate more distinctly
than the others. "I 'wouldn't say'?--and you 'let it pass'?" She looked
just coldly blank. "You really speak as if I were keeping something
back."
"Well, you see," Densher persisted, "you're not even telling me now.
All I want to know," he nevertheless explained, "is whether there was a
connexion between that proceeding on his part, which was
practically--oh beyond all doubt!--the shock precipitating for her what
has now happened, and anything that had occurred with him previously
for yourself. How in the world did he know we're engaged?"
V
Kate slowly rose; it was, since she had lighted the candles and sat
down, the first movement she had made. "Are you trying to fix it on me
that I must have told him?"
She spoke not so much in resentment as in pale dismay--which he showed
he immediately took in. "My dear child, I'm not trying to 'fix'
anything; but I'm extremely tormented and I seem not to understand.
What has the brute to do with us anyway?"
"What has he indeed?" Kate asked.
She shook her head as if in recovery, within the minute, of some mild
allowance for his unreason. There was in it--and for his reason
really--one of those half-inconsequent sweetnesses by which she had
often before made, over some point of difference, her own terms with
him. Practically she was making them now, and essentially he was
knowing it; yet inevitably, all the same, he was accepting it. She
stood there close to him, with something in her patience that suggested
her having supposed, when he spoke more appealingly, that he was going
to kiss her. He hadn't been, it appeared; but his continued appeal was
none the less the quieter. "What's he doing, from ten o'clock on
Christmas morning, with Mrs. Lowder?"