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Therefore its hour had now charmingly sounded. Whatever in life he had recovered his old rooms for, he had not recovered them to receive Milly Theale: which made no more difference in his expression of happy readiness than if he had been just what he was trying not to be fully hardened and fully base.
He had found Milly Theale twenty minutes later alone, and he had sat with her till the others returned to tea. The strange part of this was that it had been very easy, extraordinarily easy. He knew it for strange only when he was away from her, because when he was away from her he was in contact with particular things that made it so.
He walked up the Bayswater Road, but he stopped short, under the murky stars, before the modern church, in the middle of the square that, going eastward, opened out on his left. He had had his brief stupidity, but now he understood. She had guaranteed to Milly Theale through Mrs. Stringham that Kate didn't care for him. She had affirmed through the same source that the attachment was only his.
That a princess could only be a princess was a truth with which, essentially, a confidant, however responsive, had to live. Mrs. Stringham was a woman of the world, but Milly Theale was a princess, the only one she had yet had to deal with, and this in its way, too, made all the difference. It was a perfectly definite doom for the wearer it was for every one else a perfectly palpable quality.
The air, for Milly Theale, was, from the very nature of the case, destined never to rid itself of a considerable chill. This she could tell him with authority, if she could tell him nothing else; and she seemed to see now, in short, that it would importantly simplify. "Yes, it makes another; but they all together wouldn't make well, I don't know what to call it but the difference.
Very good; such things might be; she rose to the sense of being ready for them. Whatever Mrs. Lowder might have to show and one hoped one did the presumptions all justice she would have nothing like Milly Theale, who constituted the trophy producible by poor Susan. Poor Susan lingered late till the candles were low, and as soon as the table was cleared she opened her neat portfolio.
It meant, Densher for ten seconds believed, that Milly Theale was dead; so that the word at last spoken made him start. "I shall come back." "Then she's better?" "I shall come back within the month," Sir Luke repeated without heeding the question. He had dropped Densher's hand, but he held him otherwise still. "I bring you a message from Miss Theale," he said as if they hadn't spoken of her.
It was an imperative "Wait a minute," by which she both detained and dismissed him; she was particular about her minute, but he hadn't yet given her, as happened, a sign of withdrawal. "Return to our little friend. You'll find her really interesting." "If you mean Miss Theale," he said, "I shall certainly not forget her.
Lowder, Mrs. Stringham and Kate, and had kept afloat with them, under a sufficient Venetian spell, until Aunt Maud had directed him to leave them and return to Miss Theale.
The handsome girl was thus literally in control of the scene by the time Merton Densher was ready to exclaim with a high flush, or a vivid blush one didn't distinguish the embarrassment from the joy "Why, Miss Theale: fancy!" and "Why, Miss Theale: what luck!"
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