been now so conveniently marked--their friends,
Milly's and his, conveniently dispersed and left him to sit with her
till luncheon. Such was the perfect operation of the scheme on which he
had been, as he phrased it to himself, had out; so that certainly there
was that amount of justification for Kate's vision of success. He
_had_, for Mrs. Lowder--he couldn't help it while sitting there--the
air, which was the thing to be desired, of no absorption in Kate
sufficiently deep to be alarming. He had failed their young hostess
each morning as little as she had failed him; it was only to-day that
she hadn't been well enough to see him.

That had made a mark, all round; the mark was in the way in which,
gathered in the room of state, with the place, from the right time, all
bright and cool and beflowered, as always, to receive her descent,
they--the rest of them--simply looked at each other. It was
lurid--lurid, in all probability, for each of them privately--that they
had uttered no common regrets. It was strange for our young man above
all that, if the poor girl was indisposed to _that_ degree, the hush of
gravity, of apprehension, of significance of some sort, should be the
most the case--that of the guests--could permit itself. The hush, for
that matter, continued after the party of four had gone down to the
gondola and taken their places in it. Milly had sent them word that she
hoped they would go out and enjoy themselves, and this indeed had
produced a second remarkable look, a look as of their knowing, one
quite as well as the other, what such a message meant as provision for
the alternative beguilement of Densher. She wished not to have spoiled
his morning, and he had therefore, in civility, to take it as
pleasantly patched up. Mrs. Stringham had helped the affair out, Mrs.
Stringham who, when it came to that, knew their friend better than any
of them. She knew her so well that she knew herself as acting in
exquisite compliance with conditions comparatively obscure,
approximately awful to them, by not thinking it necessary to stay at
home. She had corrected that element of the perfunctory which was the
slight fault, for all of them, of the occasion; she had invented a
preference for Mrs. Lowder and herself; she had remembered the fond
dreams of the visitation of lace that had hitherto always been brushed
away by accidents, and it had come up as well for her that Kate had,
the day before, spoken of the part played by f