t," she said,
"yourself."

Densher stopped short, though at first without a word. "We never spoke
of her. Neither of us mentioned her, even to sound her name, and
nothing whatever in connexion with her passed between us."

Mrs. Stringham stared up at him, surprised at this picture. But she had
plainly an idea that after an instant resisted it. "That was his
professional propriety."

"Precisely. But it was also my sense of that virtue in him, and it was
something more besides." And he spoke with sudden intensity. "I
couldn't _talk_ to him about her!"

"Oh!" said Susan Shepherd.

"I can't talk to any one about her."

"Except to _me_," his friend continued.

"Except to you." The ghost of her smile, a gleam of significance, had
waited on her words, and it kept him, for honesty, looking at her. For
honesty too--that is for his own words--he had quickly coloured: he was
sinking so, at a stroke, the burden of his discourse with Kate. His
visitor, for the minute, while their eyes met, might have been watching
him hold it down. And he _had_ to hold it down--the effort of which,
precisely, made him red. He couldn't let it come up; at least not yet.
She might make what she would of it. He attempted to repeat his
statement, but he really modified it. "Sir Luke, at all events, had
nothing to tell me, and I had nothing to tell him. Make-believe talk
was impossible for us, and--"

"And _real_"--she had taken him right up with a huge emphasis--"was
more impossible still." No doubt--he didn't deny it; and she had
straightway drawn her conclusion. "Then that proves what I say--that
there were immensities between you. Otherwise you'd have chattered."

"I dare say," Densher granted, "we were both thinking of her."

"You were neither of you thinking of any one else. That's why you kept
together."

Well, that too, if she desired, he took from her; but he came straight
back to what he had originally said. "I haven't a notion, all the same,
of what he thinks." She faced him, visibly, with the question into
which he had already observed that her special shade of earnestness was
perpetually flowering, right and left--"Are you _very_ sure?"--and he
could only note her apparent difference from himself. "You, I judge,
believe that he thinks she's gone."

She took it, but she bore up. "It doesn't matter what I believe."

"Well, we shall see"--and he felt almost basely superficial. More and
more, for the last five minutes, had he kno