ll. What Mrs. Stringham had
announced, and what he had yet expected not to have to face, _had_ then
come. Sir Luke had kept it for the last, but there it was, and the
colourless compact form it was now taking--the tone of one man of the
world to another, who, after what had happened, would understand--was
but the characteristic manner of his appeal. Densher was to understand
remarkably much; and the great thing certainly was to show that he did.
"I'm particularly obliged, I'll go to-day." He brought that out, but in
his pause, while they continued to look at each other, the train had
slowly creaked into motion. There was time but for one more word, and
the young man chose it, out of twenty, with intense concentration.
"Then she's better?"

Sir Luke's face was wonderful. "Yes, she's better." And he kept it at
the window while the train receded, holding him with it still. It was
to be his nearest approach to the utter reference they had hitherto so
successfully avoided. If it stood for everything; never had a face had
to stand for more. So Densher, held after the train had gone, sharply
reflected; so he reflected, asking himself into what abyss it pushed
him, even while conscious of retreating under the maintained
observation of Eugenio.

BOOK TENTH

I

"Then it has been--what do you say? a whole fortnight?--without your
making a sign?"

Kate put that to him distinctly, in the December dusk of Lancaster Gate
and on the matter of the time he had been back; but he saw with it
straightway that she was as admirably true as ever to her
instinct--which was a system as well--of not admitting the possibility
between them of small resentments, of trifles to trip up their general
trust. That by itself, the renewed beauty of it, would at this fresh
sight of her have stirred him to his depths if something else,
something no less vivid but quite separate, hadn't stirred him still
more. It was in seeing her that he felt what their interruption had
been, and that they met across it even as persons whose adventures, on
either side, in time and space, of the nature of perils and exiles, had
had a peculiar strangeness. He wondered if he were as different for her
as she herself had immediately appeared: which was but his way indeed
of taking in, with his thrill, that--even going by the mere first
look--she had never been so handsome. That fact bloomed for him, in the
firelight and lamplight that glowed their welcome through