alone--Mrs. Stringham proved really prodigious--his acquaintance
with a shade of awkwardness darker than any Milly could know. He had
supposed himself beforehand, on the question of what he was doing or
pretending, in possession of some tone that would serve; but there were
three minutes of his feeling incapable of promptness quite in the same
degree in which a gentleman whose pocket has been picked feels
incapable of purchase. It even didn't help him, oddly, that he was sure
Kate would in some way have spoken for him--or rather not so much in
some way as in one very particular way. He hadn't asked her, at the
last, what she might, in the connexion, have said; nothing would have
induced him to put such a question after she had been to see him: his
lips were so sealed by that passage, his spirit in fact so hushed, in
respect to any charge upon her freedom. There was something he could
only therefore read back into the probabilities, and when he left the
palace an hour afterwards it was with a sense of having breathed there,
in the very air, the truth he had been guessing.

Just this perception it was, however, that had made him for the time
ugly to himself in his awkwardness. It was horrible, with this
creature, to _be_ awkward; it was odious to be seeking excuses for the
relation that involved it. Any relation that involved it was by the
very fact as much discredited as a dish would be at dinner if one had
to take medicine as a sauce. What Kate would have said in one of the
young women's last talks was that--if Milly absolutely must have the
truth about it--Mr. Densher was staying because she had really seen no
way but to require it of him. If he stayed he didn't follow her--or
didn't appear to her aunt to be doing so; and when she kept him from
following her Mrs. Lowder couldn't pretend, in scenes, the renewal of
which at this time of day was painful, that she after all didn't snub
him as she might. She did nothing in fact _but_ snub him--wouldn't that
have been part of the story?--only Aunt Maud's suspicions were of the
sort that had repeatedly to be dealt with. He had been, by the same
token, reasonable enough--as he now, for that matter, well might; he
had consented to oblige them, aunt and niece, by giving the plainest
sign possible that he could exist away from London. To exist away from
London was to exist away from Kate Croy--which was a gain, much
appreciated, to the latter's comfort. There was a minute, at this