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He represented what her life had never given her and certainly, without some such aid as his, never would give her; all the high, dim things she lumped together as of the mind. It was on the side of the mind that Densher was rich for her, and mysterious and strong; and he had rendered her in especial the sovereign service of making that element real.
Densher had him for a minute in profile, had him for a time during which his identity produced, however quickly, all the effect of establishing connexions connexions startling and direct; and then, as if it were the one thing more needed, seized the look, determined by a turn of the head, that might have been a prompt result of the sense of being noticed.
"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?
The music, however, gay and vociferous, had broken out afresh and protected more than interrupted them. When Densher at last spoke it was under cover. "I might stay, you know, without trying." "Oh to stay is to try." "To have for herself, you mean, the appearance of it?" "I don't see how you can have the appearance more." Densher waited. "You think it then possible she may offer marriage?"
Densher met it indirectly. "Where has he been since October?" "I think he has been back to England. He came in fact, I've reason to believe, straight from there." "Straight to do this job? All the way for his half-hour?" "Well, to try again with the help perhaps of a new fact. To make himself possibly right with her a different attempt from the other.
Densher showed he neither disbelieved nor grudged them. "But what good then on earth can I do her?" Well, she had it ready. "You can console her." "And for what?" "For all that, if she's stricken, she must see swept away. I shouldn't care for her if she hadn't so much," Kate very simply said.
It took her in from head to foot, and in doing so it told a story that made poor Densher again the least bit sick: it marked so something with which Kate habitually and consummately reckoned. That was the story that she was always, for her beneficent dragon, under arms; living up, every hour, but especially at festal hours, to the "value" Mrs. Lowder had attached to her.
Lowder's countenance, which, in the long run, she was convinced he would continue to enjoy; and as, by a blessed turn, Aunt Maud had demanded of him no promise that would tie his hands, they should be able to cultivate their destiny in their own way and yet remain loyal. One difficulty alone stood out, which Densher named.
The carriage, so possibly at such an hour and on such a day Sir Luke's own, had struck him as a sign that the great doctor was back. This would prove something else, in turn, still more intensely, and it was in the act of the double apprehension that Densher felt himself turn pale.
Lowder to deal from her own point of view with this extravagance. Densher of course straightway noted that his cue for the protection of Kate was to make, no less, all of it he could; and their tracks, as he might have said, were fairly covered by the time their hostess had taken afresh, on his renewed admission, the measure of his scant eagerness.
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