him or exposed to him at all--in his hands for whatever
he should do, and not much less affected by his mercy than one might
have been by his rigour. The grand thing--it did come to that--was the
way he carried off, as one might fairly call it, the business of making
odd things natural. Nothing, if they hadn't taken it so, could have
exceeded the unexplained oddity, between them, of Densher's now
complete detachment from the poor ladies at the palace; nothing could
have exceeded the no less marked anomaly of the great man's own
abstentions of speech. He made, as he had done when they met at the
station, nothing whatever of anything; and the effect of it, Densher
would have said, was a relation with him quite resembling that of
doctor and patient. One took the cue from him as one might have taken a
dose--except that the cue was pleasant in the taking.

That was why one could leave it to his tacit discretion, why for the
three or four days Densher again and again did so leave it; merely
wondering a little, at the most, on the eve of Saturday, the announced
term of the episode. Waiting once more on this latter occasion, the
Saturday morning, for Sir Luke's reappearance at the station, our
friend had to recognise the drop of his own borrowed ease, the result,
naturally enough, of the prospect of losing a support. The difficulty
was that, on such lines as had served them, the support was Sir Luke's
personal presence. Would he go without leaving some substitute for
that?--and without breaking, either, his silence in respect to his
errand? Densher was in still deeper ignorance than at the hour of his
call, and what was truly prodigious at so supreme a moment was that--as
had immediately to appear--no gleam of light on what he had been living
with for a week found its way out of him. What he had been doing was
proof of a huge interest as well as of a huge fee; yet when the
Leporelli gondola again, and somewhat tardily, approached, his
companion, watching from the water-steps, studied his fine closed face
as much as ever in vain. It was like a lesson, from the highest
authority, on the subject of the relevant, so that its blankness
affected Densher of a sudden almost as a cruelty, feeling it quite
awfully compatible, as he did, with Milly's having ceased to exist. And
the suspense continued after they had passed together, as time was
short, directly into the station, where Eugenio, in the field early,
was mounting guard over th