u."

He waited again an instant. "Then you swear to it?"

"To 'it'? To what?"

"Why that you do 'like' me. Since it's all for that, you know, that I'm
letting you do--well, God knows what with me."

She gave at this, with a stare, a disheartened gesture--the sense of
which she immediately further expressed. "If you don't believe in me
then, after all, hadn't you better break off before you've gone
further?"

"Break off with you?"

"Break off with Milly. You might go now," she said, "and I'll stay and
explain to her why it is."

He wondered--as if it struck him. "What would you say?"

"Why that you find you can't stand her, and that there's nothing for me
but to bear with you as I best may."

He considered of this. "How much do you abuse me to her?"

"Exactly enough. As much as you see by her attitude."

Again he thought. "It doesn't seem to me I ought to mind her attitude."

"Well then, just as you like. I'll stay and do my best for you."

He saw she was sincere, was really giving him a chance; and that of
itself made things clearer. The feeling of how far he had gone came
back to him not in repentance, but in this very vision of an escape;
and it Was not of what he had done, but of what Kate offered, that he
now weighed the consequence. "Won't it make her--her not finding me
here--be rather more sure there's something between us?"

Kate thought. "Oh I don't know. It will of course greatly upset her.
But you needn't trouble about that. She won't die of it."

"Do you mean she _will?_" Densher presently asked.

"Don't put me questions when you don't believe what I say. You make too
many conditions."

She spoke now with a shade of rational weariness that made the want of
pliancy, the failure to oblige her, look poor and ugly; so that what it
suddenly came back to for him was his deficiency in the things a man of
any taste, so engaged, so enlisted, would have liked to make sure of
being able to show--imagination, tact, positively even humour. The
circumstance is doubtless odd, but the truth is none the less that the
speculation uppermost with him at this juncture was: "What if I should
begin to bore this creature?" And that, within a few seconds, had
translated itself. "If you'll swear again you love me--!"

She looked about, at door and window, as if he were asking for more
than he said. "Here? There's nothing between us here," Kate smiled.

"Oh _isn't_ there?" Her smile itself, with this, had so set