What she thus tasted was almost a personal joy. It told
Densher of the three days she on her side had spent. "Well, anything
you do for me--_is_ for her too. Only, only--!"

"Only nothing now matters?"

She looked at him a minute as if he were the fact itself that he
expressed. "Then you know?"

"Is she dying?" he asked for all answer.

Mrs. Stringham waited--her face seemed to sound him. Then her own reply
was strange. "She hasn't so much as named you. We haven't spoken."

"Not for three days?"

"No more," she simply went on, "than if it were all over. Not even by
the faintest allusion."

"Oh," said Densher with more light, "you mean you haven't spoken about
_me?_"

"About what else? No more than if you were dead."

"Well," he answered after a moment, "I _am_ dead."

"Then I am," said Susan Shepherd with a drop of her arms on her
waterproof.

It was a tone that, for the minute, imposed itself in its dry despair;
it represented, in the bleak place, which had no life of its own, none
but the life Kate had left--the sense of which, for that matter, by
mystic channels, might fairly be reaching the visitor--the very
impotence of their extinction. And Densher had nothing to oppose it
withal, nothing but again: "Is she dying?"

It made her, however, as if these were crudities, almost material
pangs, only say as before: "Then you know?"

"Yes," he at last returned, "I know. But the marvel to me is that _you_
do. I've no right in fact to imagine or to assume that you do."

"You may," said Susan Shepherd, "all the same. I know."

"Everything?"

Her eyes, through her veil, kept pressing him. "No--not everything.
That's why I've come."

"That I shall really tell you?" With which, as she hesitated and it
affected him, he brought out in a groan a doubting "Oh, oh!" It turned
him from her to the place itself, which was a part of what was in him,
was the abode, the worn shrine more than ever, of the fact in
possession, the fact, now a thick association, for which he had hired
it. _That_ was not for telling, but Susan Shepherd was, none the less,
so decidedly wonderful that the sense of it might really have begun, by
an effect already operating, to be a part of her knowledge. He saw, and
it stirred him, that she hadn't come to judge him; had come rather, so
far as she might dare, to pity. This showed him her own
abasement--that, at any rate, of grief; and made him feel with a rush
of friendliness that he liked t