"It doesn't in the least follow," Kate went on, "that anything in the nature of what you call deception on Mrs. Stringham's part will be what you call odd.
Why shouldn't she hide the truth?"
"From Mrs. Lowder?" Densher stared. "Why should she?"
"To please you."
"And how in the world can it please me?"
Kate turned her head away as if really at last almost tired of his density.
But she looked at him again as she spoke.
"Well then to please Milly."
And before he could question:
"Don't you feel by this time that there's nothing Susan Shepherd won't do for you?"
He had verily after an instant to take it in, so sharply it corresponded with the good lady's recent reception of him.
It was queerer than anything again, the way they all came together round him.
But that was an old story, and Kate's multiplied lights led him on and on.
It was with a reserve, however, that he confessed this.
"She's ever so kind.
Only her view of the right thing may not be the same as yours."
"How can it be anything different if it's the view of serving you?"
Densher for an instant, but only for an instant, hung fire.
"Oh the difficulty is that I don't, upon my honour, even yet quite make out how yours does serve me."
"It helps you—put it then," said Kate very simply—"to serve me.
It gains you time."
"Time for what?"
"For everything!" She spoke at first, once more, with impatience; then as usual she qualified. "For anything that may happen."
Densher had a smile, but he felt it himself as strained.
"You're cryptic, love!"
It made her keep her eyes on him, and he could thus see that, by one of those incalculable motions in her without which she wouldn't have been a quarter so interesting, they half-filled with tears from some source he had too roughly touched.
"I'm taking a trouble for you I never dreamed I should take for any human creature."
Oh it went home, making him flush for it; yet he soon enough felt his reply on his lips.
"Well, isn't my whole insistence to you now that I can conjure trouble away?" And he let it, his insistence, come out again; it had so constantly had, all the week, but its step or two to make. "There need be none whatever between us.
There need be nothing but our sense of each other."
It had only the effect at first that her eyes grew dry while she took up again one of the so numerous links in her close chain.
"You can tell her anything you like, anything whatever."
"Mrs. Stringham?
I have nothing to tell her."
"You can tell her about us.
I mean," she wonderfully pursued, "that you do still like me." It was indeed so wonderful that it amused him. "Only not that you still like me." She let his amusement pass. "I'm absolutely certain she wouldn't repeat it."
"I see.
To Aunt Maud."
"You don't quite see.
Neither to Aunt Maud nor to any one else." Kate then, he saw, was always seeing Milly much more, after all, than he was; and she showed it again as she went on. "There, accordingly, is your time."
She did at last make him think, and it was fairly as if light broke, though not quite all at once.
"You must let me say I do see.
Time for something in particular that I understand you regard as possible.
Time too that, I further understand, is time for you as well."
"Time indeed for me as well." And encouraged visibly by his glow of concentration, she looked at him as through the air she had painfully made clear.
Yet she was still on her guard. "Don't think, however, I'll do all the work for you.
If you want things named you must name them."
He had quite, within the minute, been turning names over; and there was only one, which at last stared at him there dreadful, that properly fitted.
"Since she's to die I'm to marry her?"
It struck him even at the moment as fine in her that she met it with no wincing nor mincing.