He was so slow that she took him up.
"Awful?" A sound of impatience—the form of a laugh—at last escaped her. "I can't find it anything at all till I know what you're talking about."
It brought him then more to the point, though it did so at first but by making him, on the hearthrug before her, with his hands in his pockets, turn awhile to and fro.
There rose in him even with this movement a recall of another time—the hour in Venice, the hour of gloom and storm, when Susan Shepherd had sat in his quarters there very much as Kate was sitting now, and he had wondered, in pain even as now, what he might say and mightn't.
Yet the present occasion after all was somehow the easier.
He tried at any rate to attach that feeling to it while he stopped before his companion.
"The communication I speak of can't possibly belong—so far as its date is concerned—to these last days.
The postmark, which is legible, does; but it isn't thinkable, for anything else, that she wrote—!" He dropped, looking at her as if she'd understand.
It was easy to understand.
"On her deathbed?" But Kate took an instant's thought. "Aren't we agreed that there was never any one in the world like her?"
"Yes." And looking over her head he spoke clearly enough. "There was never any one in the world like her."
Kate, from her chair, always without a movement, raised her eyes to the unconscious reach of his own.
Then when the latter again dropped to her she added a question.
"And won't it further depend a little on what the communication is?"
"A little perhaps—but not much.
It's a communication," said Densher.
"Do you mean a letter?"
"Yes, a letter.
Addressed to me in her hand—in hers unmistakeably."
Kate thought.
"Do you know her hand very well?"
"Oh perfectly."
It was as if his tone for this prompted—with a slight strangeness—her next demand.
"Have you had many letters from her?"
"No.
Only three notes." He spoke looking straight at her. "And very, very short ones."
"Ah," said Kate, "the number doesn't matter. Three lines would be enough if you're sure you remember."
"I'm sure I remember.
Besides," Densher continued, "I've seen her hand in other ways.
I seem to recall how you once, before she went to Venice, showed me one of her notes precisely for that.
And then she once copied me something."
"Oh," said Kate almost with a smile, "I don't ask you for the detail of your reasons.
One good one's enough." To which however she added as if precisely not to speak with impatience or with anything like irony: "And the writing has its usual look?"
Densher answered as if even to better that description of it.
"It's beautiful."
"Yes—it was beautiful. Well," Kate, to defer to him still, further remarked, "it's not news to us now that she was stupendous.
Anything's possible."
"Yes, anything's possible"—he appeared oddly to catch at it. "That's what I say to myself.
It's what I've been believing you," he a trifle vaguely explained, "still more certain to feel."
She waited for him to say more, but he only, with his hands in his pockets, turned again away, going this time to the single window of the room, where in the absence of lamplight the blind hadn't been drawn.
He looked out into the lamplit fog, lost himself in the small sordid London street—for sordid, with his other association, he felt it—as he had lost himself, with Mrs. Stringham's eyes on him, in the vista of the Grand Canal.
It was present then to his recording consciousness that when he had last been driven to such an attitude the very depth of his resistance to the opportunity to give Kate away was what had so driven him.
His waiting companion had on that occasion waited for him to say he would; and what he had meantime glowered forth at was the inanity of such a hope.
Kate's attention, on her side, during these minutes, rested on the back and shoulders he thus familiarly presented—rested as with a view of their expression, a reference to things unimparted, links still missing and that she must ever miss, try to make them out as she would.
The result of her tension was that she again took him up.
"You received—what you spoke of—last night?" It made him turn round.
"Coming in from Fleet Street—earlier by an hour than usual—I found it with some other letters on my table.
But my eyes went straight to it, in an extraordinary way, from the door.
I recognised it, knew what it was, without touching it."
"One can understand." She listened with respect.