Densher wondered. “Possible for whom?”
“Why for you.”
“To tell her he lied?”
“To tell her he’s mistaken.”
Densher stared—he was stupefied; the “possible” thus glanced at by Kate being exactly the alternative he had had to face in Venice and to put utterly away from him. Nothing was stranger than such a difference in their view of it. “And to lie myself, you mean, to do it? We are, my dear child,” he said, “I suppose, still engaged.”
“Of course we’re still engaged. But to save her life—!”
He took in for a little the way she talked of it. Of course, it was to be remembered, she had always simplified, and it brought back his sense of the degree in which, to her energy as compared with his own, many things were easy; the very sense that so often before had moved him to admiration. “Well, if you must know—and I want you to be clear about it—I didn’t even seriously think of a denial to her face. The question of it—as possibly saving her—was put to me definitely enough; but to turn it over was only to dismiss it. Besides,” he added, “it wouldn’t have done any good.”
“You mean she would have had no faith in your correction?” She had spoken with a promptitude that affected him of a sudden as almost glib; but he himself paused with the overweight of all he meant, and she meanwhile went on. “Did you try?”
“I hadn’t even a chance.”
Kate maintained her wonderful manner, the manner of at once having it all before her and yet keeping it all at its distance. “She wouldn’t see you?”
“Not after your friend had been with her.”
She hesitated. “Couldn’t you write?”
It made him also think, but with a difference. “She had turned her face to the wall.”
This again for a moment hushed her, and they were both too grave now for parenthetic pity. But her interest came out for at least the minimum of light. “She refused even to let you speak to her?”
“My dear girl,” Densher returned, “she was miserably, prohibitively ill.”
“Well, that was what she had been before.”
“And it didn’t prevent? No,” Densher admitted, “it didn’t; and I don’t pretend that she’s not magnificent.”
“She’s prodigious,” said Kate Croy.
He looked at her a moment. “So are you, my dear. But that’s how it is,” he wound up; “and there we are.”
His idea had been in advance that she would perhaps sound him much more deeply, asking him above all two or three specific things. He had fairly fancied her even wanting to know and trying to find out how far, as the odious phrase was, he and Milly had gone, and how near, by the same token, they had come. He had asked himself if he were prepared to hear her do that, and had had to take for answer that he was prepared of course for everything. Wasn’t he prepared for her ascertaining if her two or three prophecies had found time to be made true? He had fairly believed himself ready to say whether or no the overture on Milly’s part promised according to the boldest of them had taken place. But what was in fact blessedly coming to him was that so far as such things were concerned his readiness wouldn’t be taxed. Kate’s pressure on the question of what had taken place remained so admirably general that even her present enquiry kept itself free of sharpness. “So then that after Lord Mark’s interference you never again met?”
It was what he had been all the while coming to. “No; we met once—so far as it could be called a meeting. I had stayed—I didn’t come away.”
“That,” said Kate, “was no more than decent.”
“Precisely”—he felt himself wonderful; “and I wanted to be no less. She sent for me, I went to her, and that night I left Venice.”
His companion waited. “Wouldn’t that then have been your chance?”
“To refute Lord Mark’s story? No, not even if before her there I had wanted to. What did it signify either? She was dying.”
“Well,” Kate in a manner persisted, “why not just because she was dying?” She had however all her discretion. “But of course I know that seeing her you could judge.”
“Of course seeing her I could judge. And I did see her! If I had denied you moreover,” Densher said with his eyes on her, “I’d have stuck to it.”
She took for a moment the intention of his face. “You mean that to convince her you’d have insisted or somehow proved—?”
“I mean that to convince you I’d have insisted or somehow proved—!”
Kate looked for her moment at a loss. “To convince ‘me’?”
“I wouldn’t have made my denial, in such conditions, only to take it back afterwards.”
With this quickly light came for her, and with it also her colour flamed. “Oh you’d have broken with me to make your denial a truth? You’d have ‘chucked’ me”—she embraced it perfectly—“to save your conscience?”
“I couldn’t have done anything else,” said Merton Densher. “So you see how right I was not to commit myself, and how little I could dream of it. If it ever again appears to you that I might have done so, remember what I say.”
Kate again considered, but not with the effect at once to which he pointed. “You’ve fallen in love with her.”
“Well then say so—with a dying woman. Why need you mind and what does it matter?”
It came from him, the question, straight out of the intensity of relation and the face-to-face necessity into which, from the first, from his entering the room, they had found themselves thrown; but it gave them their most extraordinary moment. “Wait till she is dead! Mrs. Stringham,” Kate added, “is to telegraph.” After which, in a tone still different, “For what then,” she asked, “did Milly send for
