wn she had brought something
with her, and never in respect to anything had he had such a wish to
postpone. He would have liked to put everything off till Thursday; he
was sorry it was now Tuesday; he wondered if he were afraid. Yet it
wasn't of Sir Luke, who was coming; nor of Milly, who was dying; nor of
Mrs. Stringham, who was sitting there. It wasn't, strange to say, of
Kate either, for Kate's presence affected him suddenly as having
swooned or trembled away. Susan Shepherd's, thus prolonged, had cast on
it some influence under which it had ceased to act. She was as absent
to his sensibility as she had constantly been, since her departure,
absent, as an echo or a reference, from the palace; and it was the
first time, among the objects now surrounding him, that his sensibility
so noted her. He knew soon enough that it was of himself he was afraid,
and that even, if he didn't take care, he should infallibly be more so.
"Meanwhile," he added for his companion, "it has been everything for me
to see you." She slowly rose at the words, which might almost have
conveyed to her the hint of his taking care. She stood there as if she
had in fact seen him abruptly moved to dismiss her. But the abruptness
would have been in this case so marked as fairly to offer ground for
insistence to her imagination of his state. It would take her moreover,
she clearly showed him she was thinking, but a minute or two to insist.
Besides, she had already said it. "Will you do it if _he_ asks you? I
mean if Sir Luke himself puts it to you. And will you give him"--oh she
was earnest now!--"the opportunity to put it to you?"

"The opportunity to put what?"

"That if you deny it to her, that may still do something."

Densher felt himself--as had already once befallen him in the quarter
of an hour--turn red to the top of his forehead. Turning red had,
however, for him, as a sign of shame, been, so to speak, discounted:
his consciousness of it at the present moment was rather as a sign of
his fear. It showed him sharply enough of what he was afraid. "If I
deny what to her?"

Hesitation, on the demand, revived in her, for hadn't he all along been
letting her see that he knew? "Why, what Lord Mark told her."

"And what did Lord Mark tell her?"

Mrs. Stringham had a look of bewilderment--of seeing him as suddenly
perverse. "I've been judging that you yourself know." And it was she
who now blushed deep.

It quickened his pity for her, but he was