there was
nobody with whom she had less in common than a remarkably handsome girl
married to a man unable to make her on any such lines as that the least
little present. Of these absurdities, however, it was not till
afterwards that Densher thought. He could think now, to any purpose,
only of what Mrs. Stringham had said to him before dinner. He could but
come back to his friend's question of a minute ago. "She's certainly
good enough, as you call it, in the sense that I'm assured she's
better. Mrs. Stringham, an hour or two since, was in great feather to
me about it. She evidently believes her better."

"Well, if they choose to call it so--!"

"And what do _you_ call it--as against them?"

"I don't call it anything to any one but you. I'm not 'against' them!"
Kate added as with just a fresh breath of impatience for all he had to
be taught.

"That's what I'm talking about," he said. "What do you call it to me?"

It made her wait a little. "She isn't better. She's worse. But that has
nothing to do with it."

"Nothing to do?" He wondered.

But she was clear. "Nothing to do with us. Except of course that we're
doing our best for her. We're making her want to live." And Kate again
watched her. "To-night she does want to live." She spoke with a
kindness that had the strange property of striking him as
inconsequent--so much, and doubtless so unjustly, had all her clearness
been an implication of the hard. "It's wonderful. It's beautiful."

"It's beautiful indeed."

He hated somehow the helplessness of his own note; but she had given it
no heed. "She's doing it for _him_"--and she nodded in the direction of
Milly's medical visitor. "She wants to be for him at her best. But she
can't deceive him."

Densher had been looking too; which made him say in a moment: "And do
you think _you_ can? I mean, if he's to be with us here, about your
sentiments. If Aunt Maud's so thick with him--!"

Aunt Maud now occupied in fact a place at his side and was visibly
doing her best to entertain him, though this failed to prevent such a
direction of his own eyes--determined, in the way such things happen,
precisely by the attention of the others--as Densher became aware of
and as Kate promptly marked. "He's looking at _you_. He wants to speak
to you."

"So Mrs. Stringham," the young man laughed, "advised me he would."

"Then let him. Be right with him. I don't need," Kate went on in answer
to the previous question, "to deceive hi