low of their recent embrace.

Any confusion attaching to this adventure, however, dropped from Kate,
whom, as he could see with sacred joy, it must take more than that to
make compunctious. "I don't say we can do it again. I mean," she
explained, "meet here."

Densher indeed had been wondering where they could do it again. If
Lancaster Gate was so limited that issue reappeared. "I mayn't come
back at all?"

"Certainly--to see her. It's she, really," his companion smiled, "who's
in love with you."

But it made him--a trifle more grave--look at her a moment. "Don't make
out, you know, that every one's in love with me."

She hesitated. "I don't say every one."

"You said just now Miss Theale."

"I said she liked you--yes."

"Well, it comes to the same thing." With which, however, he pursued:
"Of course I ought to thank Mrs. Lowder in person. I mean for
_this_--as from myself."

"Ah but, you know, not too much!" She had an ironic gaiety for the
implications of his "this," besides wishing to insist on a general
prudence. "She'll wonder what you're thanking her for!"

Densher did justice to both considerations. "Yes, I can't very well
tell her all."

It was perhaps because he said it so gravely that Kate was again in a
manner amused. Yet she gave out light. "You can't very well 'tell' her
anything, and that doesn't matter. Only be nice to her. Please her;
make her see how clever you are--only without letting her see that
you're trying. If you're charming to her you've nothing else to do."

But she oversimplified too. "I can be 'charming' to her, so far as I
see, only by letting her suppose I give you up--which I'll be hanged if
I do! It _is_," he said with feeling, "a game."

"Of course it's a game. But she'll never suppose you give me up--or I
give _you_--if you keep reminding her how you enjoy our interviews."

"Then if she has to see us as obstinate and constant," Densher asked,
"what good does it do?"

Kate was for a moment checked. "What good does what--?"

"Does my pleasing her--does anything. I _can't_," he impatiently
declared, "please her."

Kate looked at him hard again, disappointed at his want of consistency;
but it appeared to determine in her something better than a mere
complaint. "Then _I_ can! Leave it to me." With which she came to him
under the compulsion, again, that had united them shortly before, and
took hold of him in her urgency to the same tender purpose. It was her
form of ent