had compared her once, we know, to
a "new book," an uncut volume of the highest, the rarest quality; and
his emotion (to justify that) was again and again like the thrill of
turning the page. "Well, you know how deeply I marvel at the way _you_
see it!"

"It doesn't in the least follow," Kate went on, "that anything in the
nature of what you call deception on Mrs. Stringham's part will be what
you call odd. Why shouldn't she hide the truth?"

"From Mrs. Lowder?" Densher stared. "Why should she?"

"To please you."

"And how in the world can it please me?"

Kate turned her head away as if really at last almost tired of his
density. But she looked at him again as she spoke. "Well then to please
Milly." And before he could question: "Don't you feel by this time that
there's nothing Susan Shepherd won't do for you?"

He had verily after an instant to take it in, so sharply it
corresponded with the good lady's recent reception of him. It was
queerer than anything again, the way they all came together round him.
But that was an old story, and Kate's multiplied lights led him on and
on. It was with a reserve, however, that he confessed this. "She's ever
so kind. Only her view of the right thing may not be the same as yours."

"How can it be anything different if it's the view of serving you?"

Densher for an instant, but only for an instant, hung fire. "Oh the
difficulty is that I don't, upon my honour, even yet quite make out how
yours does serve me."

"It helps you--put it then," said Kate very simply--"to serve _me_. It
gains you time."

"Time for what?"

"For everything!" She spoke at first, once more, with impatience; then
as usual she qualified. "For anything that may happen."

Densher had a smile, but he felt it himself as strained. "You're
cryptic, love!"

It made her keep her eyes on him, and he could thus see that, by one of
those incalculable motions in her without which she wouldn't have been
a quarter so interesting, they half-filled with tears from some source
he had too roughly touched. "I'm taking a trouble for you I never
dreamed I should take for any human creature."

Oh it went home, making him flush for it; yet he soon enough felt his
reply on his lips. "Well, isn't my whole insistence to you now that I
can conjure trouble away?" And he let it, his insistence, come out
again; it had so constantly had, all the week, but its step or two to
make. "There _need_ be none whatever between us. The