e compartment he had secured. The strain,
though probably lasting, at the carriage-door, but a couple of minutes,
prolonged itself so for our poor gentleman's nerves that he
involuntarily directed a long look at Eugenio, who met it, however, as
only Eugenio could. Sir Luke's attention was given for the time to the
right bestowal of his numerous effects, about which he was particular,
and Densher fairly found himself, so far as silence could go,
questioning the representative of the palace. It didn't humiliate him
now; it didn't humiliate him even to feel that that personage exactly
knew how little he satisfied him. Eugenio resembled to that extent Sir
Luke--to the extent of the extraordinary things with which his facial
habit was compatible. By the time, however, that Densher had taken from
it all its possessor intended Sir Luke was free and with a hand out for
farewell. He offered the hand at first without speech; only on meeting
his eyes could our young man see that they had never yet so completely
looked at him. It was never, with Sir Luke, that they looked harder at
one time than at another; but they looked longer, and this, even a
shade of it, might mean on his part everything. It meant, Densher for
ten seconds believed, that Milly Theale was dead; so that the word at
last spoken made him start.

"I shall come back."

"Then she's better?"

"I shall come back within the month," Sir Luke repeated without heeding
the question. He had dropped Densher's hand, but he held him otherwise
still. "I bring you a message from Miss Theale," he said as if they
hadn't spoken of her. "I'm commissioned to ask you from her to go and
see her."

Densher's rebound from his supposition had a violence that his stare
betrayed. "She asks me?"

Sir Luke had got into the carriage, the door of which the guard had
closed; but he spoke again as he stood at the window, bending a little
but not leaning out. "She told me she'd like it, and I promised that,
as I expected to find you here, I'd let you know."

Densher, on the platform, took it from him, but what he took brought
the blood into his face quite as what he had had to take from Mrs.
Stringham. And he was also bewildered. "Then she can receive--?"

"She can receive you."

"And you're coming back--?"

"Oh because I must. She's not to move. She's to stay. I come to her."

"I see, I see," said Densher, who indeed did see--saw the sense of his
friend's words and saw beyond it as we