ace, under her veil, richly rosy
with the driving wind, was--and the veil too--as splashed as if the
rain were her tears.

III

They came to it almost immediately; he was to wonder afterwards at the
fewness of their steps. "She has turned her face to the wall."

"You mean she's worse?"

The poor lady stood there as she had stopped; Densher had, in the
instant flare of his eagerness, his curiosity, all responsive at sight
of her, waved away, on the spot, the padrona, who had offered to
relieve her of her mackintosh. She looked vaguely about through her wet
veil, intensely alive now to the step she had taken and wishing it not
to have been in the dark, but clearly, as yet, seeing nothing. "I don't
know _how_ she is--and it's why I've come to you."

"I'm glad enough you've come," he said, "and it's quite--you make me
feel--as if I had been wretchedly waiting for you."

She showed him again her blurred eyes--she had caught at his word.
"Have you been wretched?"

Now, however, on his lips, the word expired. It would have sounded for
him like a complaint, and before something he already made out in his
visitor he knew his own trouble as small. Hers, under her damp
draperies, which shamed his lack of a fire, was great, and he felt she
had brought it all with her. He answered that he had been patient and
above all that he had been still. "As still as a mouse--you'll have
seen it for yourself. Stiller, for three days together, than I've ever
been in my life. It has seemed to me the only thing."

This qualification of it as a policy or a remedy was straightway for
his friend, he saw, a light that her own light could answer. "It has
been best. I've wondered for you. But it has been best," she said again.

"Yet it has done no good?"

"I don't know. I've been afraid you were gone." Then as he gave a
headshake which, though slow, was deeply mature: "You _won't_ go?"

"Is to 'go,'" he asked, "to be still?"

"Oh I mean if you'll stay for me."

"I'll do anything for you. Isn't it for you alone now I can?"

She thought of it, and he could see even more of the relief she was
taking from him. His presence, his face, his voice, the old rooms
themselves, so meagre yet so charged, where Kate had admirably been to
him--these things counted for her, now she had them, as the help she
had been wanting: so that she still only stood there taking them all
in. With it however popped up characteristically a throb of her
conscience.