Stiller, for three days together, than I've ever been in my life.
It has seemed to me the only thing."
This qualification of it as a policy or a remedy was straightway for his friend, he saw, a light that her own light could answer.
"It has been best.
I've wondered for you.
But it has been best," she said again.
"Yet it has done no good?"
"I don't know.
I've been afraid you were gone." Then as he gave a headshake which, though slow, was deeply mature: "You won't go?"
"Is to 'go,'" he asked, "to be still?"
"Oh I mean if you'll stay for me."
"I'll do anything for you.
Isn't it for you alone now I can?"
She thought of it, and he could see even more of the relief she was taking from him.
His presence, his face, his voice, the old rooms themselves, so meagre yet so charged, where Kate had admirably been to him—these things counted for her, now she had them, as the help she had been wanting: so that she still only stood there taking them all in.
With it however popped up characteristically a throb of her conscience.
What she thus tasted was almost a personal joy.
It told Densher of the three days she on her side had spent.
"Well, anything you do for me—is for her too.
Only, only—!"
"Only nothing now matters?"
She looked at him a minute as if he were the fact itself that he expressed.
"Then you know?"
"Is she dying?" he asked for all answer.
Mrs. Stringham waited—her face seemed to sound him.
Then her own reply was strange.
"She hasn't so much as named you.
We haven't spoken."
"Not for three days?"
"No more," she simply went on, "than if it were all over.
Not even by the faintest allusion."
"Oh," said Densher with more light, "you mean you haven't spoken about me?"
"About what else?
No more than if you were dead."
"Well," he answered after a moment, "I am dead."
"Then I am," said Susan Shepherd with a drop of her arms on her waterproof.
It was a tone that, for the minute, imposed itself in its dry despair; it represented, in the bleak place, which had no life of its own, none but the life Kate had left—the sense of which, for that matter, by mystic channels, might fairly be reaching the visitor—the very impotence of their extinction.
And Densher had nothing to oppose it withal, nothing but again:
"Is she dying?"
It made her, however, as if these were crudities, almost material pangs, only say as before:
"Then you know?"
"Yes," he at last returned, "I know.
But the marvel to me is that you do.
I've no right in fact to imagine or to assume that you do."
"You may," said Susan Shepherd, "all the same. I know."
"Everything?"
Her eyes, through her veil, kept pressing him.
"No—not everything.
That's why I've come."
"That I shall really tell you?" With which, as she hesitated and it affected him, he brought out in a groan a doubting "Oh, oh!"