"You haven't seen him?"
"Not since he saw her."
"You've known then of his seeing her?"
"Certainly.
From Mrs. Stringham."
"And have you known," Densher went on, "the rest?"
Kate wondered.
"What rest?"
"Why everything.
It was his visit that she couldn't stand—it was what then took place that simply killed her."
"Oh!" Kate seriously breathed.
But she had turned pale, and he saw that, whatever her degree of ignorance of these connexions, it wasn't put on.
"Mrs. Stringham hasn't said that."
He observed none the less that she didn't ask what had then taken place; and he went on with his contribution to her knowledge.
"The way it affected her was that it made her give up.
She has given up beyond all power to care again, and that's why she's dying."
"Oh!" Kate once more slowly sighed, but with a vagueness that made him pursue.
"One can see now that she was living by will—which was very much what you originally told me of her."
"I remember.
That was it."
"Well then her will, at a given moment, broke down, and the collapse was determined by that fellow's dastardly stroke.
He told her, the scoundrel, that you and I are secretly engaged."
Kate gave a quick glare.
"But he doesn't know it!"
"That doesn't matter.
She did by the time he had left her.
Besides," Densher added, "he does know it.
When," he continued, "did you last see him?"
But she was lost now in the picture before her.
"That was what made her worse?"
He watched her take it in—it so added to her sombre beauty.
Then he spoke as Mrs. Stringham had spoken.
"She turned her face to the wall."
"Poor Milly!" said Kate.
Slight as it was, her beauty somehow gave it style; so that he continued consistently:
"She learned it, you see, too soon—since of course one's idea had been that she might never even learn it at all.
And she had felt sure—through everything we had done—of there not being between us, so far at least as you were concerned, anything she need regard as a warning."
She took another moment for thought.
"It wasn't through anything you did—whatever that may have been—that she gained her certainty.
It was by the conviction she got from me."
"Oh it's very handsome," Densher said, "for you to take your share!"
"Do you suppose," Kate asked, "that I think of denying it?"
Her look and her tone made him for the instant regret his comment, which indeed had been the first that rose to his lips as an effect absolutely of what they would have called between them her straightness.
Her straightness, visibly, was all his own loyalty could ask.
Still, that was comparatively beside the mark.
"Of course I don't suppose anything but that we're together in our recognitions, our responsibilities—whatever we choose to call them.
It isn't a question for us of apportioning shares or distinguishing invidiously among such impressions as it was our idea to give."
"It wasn't your idea to give impressions," said Kate.
He met this with a smile that he himself felt, in its strained character, as queer.
"Don't go into that!"