hour,
out of Densher's three, during which he knew the terror of Milly's
uttering some such allusion to their friend's explanation as he must
meet with words that wouldn't destroy it. To destroy it was to destroy
everything, to destroy probably Kate herself, to destroy in particular
by a breach of faith still uglier than anything else the beauty of
their own last passage. He had given her his word of honour that if she
would come to him he would act absolutely in her sense, and he had done
so with a full enough vision of what her sense implied. What it implied
for one thing was that to-night in the great saloon, noble in its
half-lighted beauty, and straight in the white face of his young
hostess, divine in her trust, or at any rate inscrutable in her
mercy--what it implied was that he should lie with his lips. The single
thing, of all things, that could save him from it would be Milly's
letting him off after having thus scared him. What made her mercy
inscrutable was that if she had already more than once saved him it was
yet apparently without knowing how nearly he was lost.

These were transcendent motions, not the less blest for being obscure;
whereby yet once more he was to feel the pressure lighten. He was kept
on his feet in short by the felicity of her not presenting him with
Kate's version as aversion to adopt. He couldn't stand up to lie--he
felt as if he should have to go down on his knees. As it was he just
sat there shaking a little for nervousness the leg he had crossed over
the other. She was sorry for his suffered snub, but he had nothing more
to subscribe to, to perjure himself about, than the three or four
inanities he had, on his own side, feebly prepared for the crisis. He
scrambled a little higher than the reference to money and clothes,
letters and directions from his manager; but he brought out the beauty
of the chance for him--there before him like a temptress painted by
Titian--to do a little quiet writing. He was vivid for a moment on the
difficulty of writing quietly in London; and he was precipitate, almost
explosive, on his idea, long cherished, of a book.

The explosion lighted her face. "You'll do your book here?"

"I hope to begin it."

"It's something you haven't begun?"

"Well, only just."

"And since you came?"

She was so full of interest that he shouldn't perhaps after all be too
easily let off. "I tried to think a few days ago that I had broken
ground."

Scarcely anythin