That's why I probably just sounded to you," he explained, "as if I hoped it might be over."
She gave him her quietest attention, but he by this time saw that, so far as telling her all was concerned, she would be divided between the wish and the reluctance to hear it; between the curiosity that, not unnaturally, would consume her and the opposing scruple of a respect for misfortune.
The more she studied him too—and he had never so felt her closely attached to his face—the more the choice of an attitude would become impossible to her.
There would simply be a feeling uppermost, and the feeling wouldn't be eagerness.
This perception grew in him fast, and he even, with his imagination, had for a moment the quick forecast of her possibly breaking out at him, should he go too far, with a wonderful:
"What horrors are you telling me?"
It would have the sound—wouldn't it be open to him fairly to bring that out himself?—of a repudiation, for pity and almost for shame, of everything that in Venice had passed between them.
Not that she would confess to any return upon herself; not that she would let compunction or horror give her away; but it was in the air for him—yes—that she wouldn't want details, that she positively wouldn't take them, and that, if he would generously understand it from her, she would prefer to keep him down.
Nothing, however, was more definite for him than that at the same time he must remain down but so far as it suited him.
Something rose strong within him against his not being free with her.
She had been free enough about it all, three months before, with him.
That was what she was at present only in the sense of treating him handsomely.
"I can believe," she said with perfect consideration, "how dreadful for you much of it must have been."
He didn't however take this up; there were things about which he wished first to be clear.
"There's no other possibility, by what you now know?
I mean for her life." And he had just to insist—she would say as little as she could. "She is dying?"
"She's dying."
It was strange to him, in the matter of Milly, that Lancaster Gate could make him any surer; yet what in the world, in the matter of Milly, wasn't strange?
Nothing was so much so as his own behaviour—his present as well as his past.
He could but do as he must.
"Has Sir Luke Strett," he asked, "gone back to her?"
"I believe he's there now."
"Then," said Densher, "it's the end."
She took it in silence for whatever he deemed it to be; but she spoke otherwise after a minute.
"You won't know, unless you've perhaps seen him yourself, that Aunt Maud has been to him."
"Oh!" Densher exclaimed, with nothing to add to it.
"For real news," Kate herself after an instant added.
"She hasn't thought Mrs. Stringham's real?"
"It's perhaps only I who haven't.
It was on Aunt Maud's trying again three days ago to see him that she heard at his house of his having gone.
He had started I believe some days before."
"And won't then by this time be back?"
Kate shook her head.
"She sent yesterday to know."
"He won't leave her then"—Densher had turned it over—"while she lives.
He'll stay to the end.
He's magnificent."
"I think she is," said Kate.
It had made them again look at each other long; and what it drew from him rather oddly was:
"Oh you don't know!"
"Well, she's after all my friend."
It was somehow, with her handsome demur, the answer he had least expected of her; and it fanned with its breath, for a brief instant, his old sense of her variety.
"I see.
You would have been sure of it.
You were sure of it."
"Of course I was sure of it."
And a pause again, with this, fell upon them; which Densher, however, presently broke.
"If you don't think Mrs. Stringham's news 'real' what do you think of Lord Mark's?"
She didn't think anything.
"Lord Mark's?"