Only Kate at all events knew—what Kate did know, and she was also the last person interested to tell it; in spite of which it was as if his act, so deeply associated with her and never to be recalled nor recovered, was abroad on the winds of the world.
His honesty, as he viewed it with Kate, was the very element of that menace: to the degree that he saw at moments, as to their final impulse or their final remedy, the need to bury in the dark blindness of each other's arms the knowledge of each other that they couldn't undo.
Save indeed that the sense in which it was in these days a question of arms was limited, this might have been the intimate expedient to which they were actually resorting.
It had its value, in conditions that made everything count, that thrice over, in Battersea Park—where Mrs. Lowder now never drove—he had adopted the usual means, in sequestered alleys, of holding her close to his side.
She could make absences, on her present footing, without having too inordinately to account for them at home—which was exactly what gave them for the first time an appreciable margin.
He supposed she could always say in Chelsea—though he didn't press it—that she had been across the town, in decency, for a look at her aunt; whereas there had always been reasons at Lancaster Gate for her not being able to plead the look at her other relatives.
It was therefore between them a freedom of a purity as yet untasted; which for that matter also they made in various ways no little show of cherishing as such.
They made the show indeed in every way but the way of a large use—an inconsequence that they almost equally gave time to helping each other to regard as natural.
He put it to his companion that the kind of favour he now enjoyed at Lancaster Gate, the wonderful warmth of his reception there, cut in a manner the ground from under their feet.
He was too horribly trusted—they had succeeded too well.
He couldn't in short make appointments with her without abusing Aunt Maud, and he couldn't on the other hand haunt that lady without tying his hands.
Kate saw what he meant just as he saw what she did when she admitted that she was herself, to a degree scarce less embarrassing, in the enjoyment of Aunt Maud's confidence.
It was special at present—she was handsomely used; she confessed accordingly to a scruple about misapplying her licence.
Mrs. Lowder then finally had found—and all unconsciously now—the way to baffle them.
It wasn't however that they didn't meet a little, none the less, in the southern quarter, to point for their common benefit the moral of their defeat.
They crossed the river; they wandered in neighbourhoods sordid and safe; the winter was mild, so that, mounting to the top of trams, they could rumble together to Clapham or to Greenwich.
If at the same time their minutes had never been so counted it struck Densher that by a singular law their tone—he scarce knew what to call it—had never been so bland.
Not to talk of what they might have talked of drove them to other ground; it was as if they used a perverse insistence to make up what they ignored.
They concealed their pursuit of the irrelevant by the charm of their manner; they took precautions for the courtesy they had formerly left to come of itself; often, when he had quitted her, he stopped short, walking off, with the aftersense of their change.
He would have described their change—had he so far faced it as to describe it—by their being so damned civil.
That had even, with the intimate, the familiar at the point to which they had brought them, a touch almost of the droll.
What danger had there ever been of their becoming rude—after each had long since made the other so tremendously tender?
Such were the things he asked himself when he wondered what in particular he most feared.
Yet all the while too the tension had its charm—such being the interest of a creature who could bring one back to her by such different roads.
It was her talent for life again; which found in her a difference for the differing time.
She didn't give their tradition up; she but made of it something new.
Frankly moreover she had never been more agreeable nor in a way—to put it prosaically—better company: he felt almost as if he were knowing her on that defined basis—which he even hesitated whether to measure as reduced or as extended; as if at all events he were admiring her as she was probably admired by people she met "out."
He hadn't in fine reckoned that she would still have something fresh for him; yet this was what she had—that on the top of a tram in the Borough he felt as if he were next her at dinner.
What a person she would be if they had been rich—with what a genius for the so-called great life, what a presence for the so-called great house, what a grace for the so-called great positions!
He might regret at once, while he was about it, that they weren't princes or billionaires.
She had treated him on their Christmas to a softness that had struck him at the time as of the quality of fine velvet, meant to fold thick, but stretched a little thin; at present, however, she gave him the impression of a contact multitudinous as only the superficial can be.
She had throughout never a word for what went on at home.
She came out of that and she returned to it, but her nearest reference was the look with which, each time, she bade him good-bye.
The look was her repeated prohibition:
"It's what I have to see and to know—so don't touch it.
That but wakes up the old evil, which I keep still, in my way, by sitting by it.
I go now—leave me alone!—to sit by it again.
The way to pity me—if that's what you want—is to believe in me.
If we could really do anything it would be another matter."
He watched her, when she went her way, with the vision of what she thus a little stiffly carried.
It was confused and obscure, but how, with her head high, it made her hold herself!
He really in his own person might at these moments have been swaying a little aloft as one of the objects in her poised basket.
It was doubtless thanks to some such consciousness as this that he felt the lapse of the weeks, before the day of Kate's mounting of his stair, almost swingingly rapid.
They contained for him the contradiction that, whereas periods of waiting are supposed in general to keep the time slow, it was the wait, actually, that made the pace trouble him.
The secret of that anomaly, to be plain, was that he was aware of how, while the days melted, something rare went with them.
This something was only a thought, but a thought precisely of such freshness and such delicacy as made the precious, of whatever sort, most subject to the hunger of time.
The thought was all his own, and his intimate companion was the last person he might have shared it with.
He kept it back like a favourite pang; left it behind him, so to say, when he went out, but came home again the sooner for the certainty of finding it there.
Then he took it out of its sacred corner and its soft wrappings; he undid them one by one, handling them, handling it, as a father, baffled and tender, might handle a maimed child.
But so it was before him—in his dread of who else might see it.