y afraid of himself, he was not afraid of
Sir Luke. He had an impression, which he clung to, based on a previous
taste of the visitor's company, that _he_ would somehow let him off.
The truth about Milly perched on his shoulders and sounded in his
tread, became by the fact of his presence the name and the form, for
the time, of everything in the place; but it didn't, for the
difference, sit in his face, the face so squarely and easily turned to
Densher at the earlier season. His presence on the first occasion, not
as the result of a summons, but as a friendly whim of his own, had had
quite another value; and though our young man could scarce regard that
value as recoverable he yet reached out in imagination to a renewal of
the old contact. He didn't propose, as he privately and forcibly
phrased the matter, to be a hog; but there was something he after all
did want for himself. It was something--this stuck to him--that Sir
Luke would have had for him if it hadn't been impossible. These were
his worst days, the two or three; those on which even the sense of the
tension at the palace didn't much help him not to feel that his destiny
made but light of him. He had never been, as he judged it, so down. In
mean conditions, without books, without society, almost without money,
he had nothing to do but to wait. His main support really was his
original idea, which didn't leave him, of waiting for the deepest depth
his predicament could sink him to. Fate would invent, if he but gave it
time, some refinement of the horrible. It was just inventing meanwhile
this suppression of Sir Luke. When the third day came without a sign he
knew what to think. He had given Mrs. Stringham during her call on him
no such answer as would have armed her faith, and the ultimatum she had
described as ready for him when _he_ should be ready was therefore--if
on no other ground than her want of this power to answer for him--not
to be presented. The presentation, heaven knew, was not what he desired.

That was not, either, we hasten to declare--as Densher then soon enough
saw--the idea with which Sir Luke finally stood before him again. For
stand before him again he finally did; just when our friend had
gloomily embraced the belief that the limit of his power to absent
himself from London obligations would have been reached. Four or five
days, exclusive of journeys, represented the largest supposable
sacrifice--to a head not crowned--on the part of one of