The Wings of the Dove, Volume 2

how she is—and it's why I've come to you.'

'I'm glad enough you've come,' he said, 'and it's quite—you make me feel—as if I had been wretchedly waiting for you.'

She showed him again her blurred eyes—she had caught at his word. 'Have you been wretched?'

Now, however, on his lips, the word expired. It would have sounded for him like a complaint, and before something he already made out in his visitor he knew his own trouble as small. Hers, under her damp draperies, which shamed his lack of a fire, was great, and he felt she had brought it all with her. He answered that he had been patient and above all that he had been still. 'As still as a mouse—you'll have seen it for yourself. 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!' It turned him from her to the place itself, which was a part of what was in him, was the abode, the worn shrine more than ever, of the fact in possession, the fact, now a thick association, for which he had hired it. That was not for telling, but Susan Shepherd was, none the less, so decidedly wonderful that the sense of it might really have begun, by an effect already operating, to be a part of her knowledge. He saw, and it stirred him, that she hadn't come to judge him; had come rather, so far as she might dare, to pity. This showed him her own abasement—that, at any rate, of grief; and made him feel with a rush of friendliness that he liked to be with her. The rush had quickened when she met his groan with an attenuation.

'We shall at all events—if that's anything—be together.'

It was his own good impulse in herself. 'It's what I've ventured to feel. It's much.' She replied in effect, silently, that it was whatever he liked; on which, so far as he had been afraid for anything, he knew his fear had dropped. The comfort was huge, for it gave back to him something precious, over which, in the effort of recovery, his own hand had too imperfectly closed. Kate, he remembered, had said to him, with her sole and single boldness—and also on grounds he hadn't then measured—that Mrs. Stringham was a person who wouldn't, at a pinch, in a stretch of confidence, wince. It was but another of the cases in which Kate was always showing. 'You don't think then very horridly of me?'

And her answer was the more valuable that it came without nervous effusion—quite as if she understood what he might conceivably have believed. She turned over in fact what she thought, and that was what helped him. 'Oh you've been extraordinary!'

It made him aware the next moment of how they had been planted there. She took off her cloak with his aid, though when she had also, accepting a seat, removed her veil, he recognised in her personal ravage that the words she had just uttered to him were the one flower she had to throw. They were all her consolation for him, and the consolation even still depended on the event. She sat with him at any rate in the grey clearance, as sad as a winter