So it's all right."
"Through your also having, you mean, refused him?"
She balanced an instant during which Densher might have just wondered if pure historic truth were to suffer a slight strain.
But she dropped on the right side.
"I haven't let it come to that.
I've been too discouraging.
Aunt Maud," she went on—now as lucid as ever—"considers, no doubt, that she has a pledge from him in respect to me; a pledge that would have been broken if Milly had accepted him.
As the case stands that makes no difference."
Densher laughed out.
"It isn't his merit that he has failed."
"It's still his merit, my dear, that he's Lord Mark.
He's just what he was, and what he knew he was.
It's not for me either to reflect on him after I've so treated him."
"Oh," said Densher impatiently, "you've treated him beautifully."
"I'm glad," she smiled, "that you can still be jealous." But before he could take it up she had more to say. "I don't see why it need puzzle you that Milly's so marked line gratifies Aunt Maud more than anything else can displease her.
What does she see but that Milly herself recognises her situation with you as too precious to be spoiled?
Such a recognition as that can't but seem to her to involve in some degree your own recognition.
Out of which she therefore gets it that the more you have for Milly the less you have for me."
There were moments again—we know that from the first they had been numerous—when he felt with a strange mixed passion the mastery of her mere way of putting things.
There was something in it that bent him at once to conviction and to reaction.
And this effect, however it be named, now broke into his tone.
"Oh if she began to know what I have for you—!"
It wasn't ambiguous, but Kate stood up to it.
"Luckily for us we may really consider she doesn't.
So successful have we been."
"Well," he presently said, "I take from you what you give me, and I suppose that, to be consistent—to stand on my feet where I do stand at all—I ought to thank you.
Only, you know, what you give me seems to me, more than anything else, the larger and larger size of my job.
It seems to me more than anything else what you expect of me.
It never seems to me somehow what I may expect of you.
There's so much you don't give me."
She appeared to wonder.
"And pray what is it I don't—?"
"I give you proof," said Densher. "You give me none."
"What then do you call proof?" she after a moment ventured to ask.
"Your doing something for me."
She considered with surprise.
"Am I not doing this for you?
Do you call this nothing?"
"Nothing at all."
"Ah I risk, my dear, everything for it."
They had strolled slowly further, but he was brought up short.
"I thought you exactly contend that, with your aunt so bamboozled, you risk nothing!"
It was the first time since the launching of her wonderful idea that he had seen her at a loss.
He judged the next instant moreover that she didn't like it—either the being so or the being seen, for she soon spoke with an impatience that showed her as wounded; an appearance that produced in himself, he no less quickly felt, a sharp pang of indulgence.
"What then do you wish me to risk?"
The appeal from danger touched him, but all to make him, as he would have said, worse.
"What I wish is to be loved.
How can I feel at this rate that I am?"
Oh she understood him, for all she might so bravely disguise it, and that made him feel straighter than if she hadn't.
Deep, always, was his sense of life with her—deep as it had been from the moment of those signs of life that in the dusky London of two winters ago they had originally exchanged.