every chance for
insistence. How was she?--why she was as he thus saw her and as she had
reasons of her own, nobody else's business, for desiring to appear.
Kate's account of her as too proud for pity, as fiercely shy about so
personal a secret, came back to him; so that he rejoiced he could take
a hint, especially when he wanted to. The question the girl had quickly
disposed of--"Oh it was nothing: I'm all right, thank you!"--was one he
was glad enough to be able to banish. It wasn't at all, in spite of the
appeal Kate had made to him on it, his affair; for his interest had
been invoked in the name of compassion, and the name of compassion was
exactly what he felt himself at the end of two minutes forbidden so
much as to whisper. He had been sent to see her in order to be sorry
for her, and how sorry he might be, quite privately, he was yet to make
out. Didn't that signify, however, almost not at all?--inasmuch as,
whatever his upshot, he was never to give her a glimpse of it. Thus the
ground was unexpectedly cleared; though it was not till a slightly
longer time had passed that he read clear, at first with amusement and
then with a strange shade of respect, what had most operated.
Extraordinarily, quite amazingly, he began to see that if his pity
hadn't had to yield to still other things it would have had to yield
quite definitely to her own. That was the way the case had turned
round: he had made his visit to be sorry for her, but he would repeat
it--if he did repeat it--in order that she might be sorry for him. His
situation made him, she judged--when once one liked him--a subject for
that degree of tenderness: he felt this judgement in her, and felt it
as something he should really, in decency, in dignity, in common
honesty, have very soon to reckon with.

Odd enough was it certainly that the question originally before him,
the question placed there by Kate, should so of a sudden find itself
quite dislodged by another. This other, it was easy to see, came
straight up with the fact of her beautiful delusion and her wasted
charity; the whole thing preparing for him as pretty a case of
conscience as he could have desired, and one at the prospect of which
he was already wincing. If he was interesting it was because he was
unhappy; and if he was unhappy it was because his passion for Kate had
spent itself in vain; and if Kate was indifferent, inexorable, it was
because she had left Milly in no doubt of it. That above a