pected her in
advance to find clear. She took up room, and it was almost as if room
had been made for her. Kate had appeared to take for granted he would
know why it had been made; but that was just the point. It was a
foreground in which he himself, in which his connexion with Kate,
scarce enjoyed a space to turn round. But Miss Theale was perhaps at
the present juncture a possibility of the same sort as the softened, if
not the squared, Aunt Maud. It might be true of her also that if she
weren't a bore she'd be a convenience. It rolled over him of a sudden,
after he had resumed his walk, that this might easily be what Kate had
meant. The charming girl adored her--Densher had for himself made out
that--and would protect, would lend a hand, to their interviews. These
might take place, in other words, on her premises, which would remove
them still better from the streets. _That_ was an explanation which did
hang together. It was impaired a little, of a truth, by this fact that
their next encounter was rather markedly not to depend upon her. Yet
this fact in turn would be accounted for by the need of more
preliminaries. One of the things he conceivably should gain on Thursday
at Lancaster Gate would be a further view of that propriety.

II

It was extraordinary enough that he should actually be finding himself,
when Thursday arrived, none so wide of the mark. Kate hadn't come all
the way to this for him, but she had come to a good deal by the end of
a quarter of an hour. What she had begun with was her surprise at her
appearing to have left him on Tuesday anything more to understand. The
parts, as he now saw, under her hand, did fall more or less together,
and it wasn't even as if she had spent the interval in twisting and
fitting them. She was bright and handsome, not fagged and worn, with
the general clearness; for it certainly stuck out enough that if the
American ladies themselves weren't to be squared, which was absurd,
they fairly imposed the necessity of trying Aunt Maud again. One
couldn't say to them, kind as she had been to them: "We'll meet,
please, whenever you'll let us, at your house; but we count on you to
help us to keep it secret." They must in other terms inevitably speak
to Aunt Maud--it would be of the last awkwardness to ask them not to:
Kate had embraced all this in her choice of speaking first. What Kate
embraced altogether was indeed wonderful to-day for Densher, though he
perhaps struck himsel