-yes--that she
wouldn't want details, that she positively wouldn't take them, and
that, if he would generously understand it from her, she would prefer
to keep him down. Nothing, however, was more definite for him than that
at the same time he must remain down but so far as it suited him.
Something rose strong within him against his not being free with her.
She had been free enough about it all, three months before, with _him_.
That was what she was at present only in the sense of treating him
handsomely. "I can believe," she said with perfect consideration, "how
dreadful for you much of it must have been."

He didn't however take this up; there were things about which he wished
first to be clear. "There's no other possibility, by what you now know?
I mean for her life." And he had just to insist--she would say as
little as she could. "She _is_ dying?"

"She's dying."

It was strange to him, in the matter of Milly, that Lancaster Gate
could make him any surer; yet what in the world, in the matter of
Milly, wasn't strange? Nothing was so much so as his own behaviour--his
present as well as his past. He could but do as he must. "Has Sir Luke
Strett," he asked, "gone back to her?"

"I believe he's there now."

"Then," said Densher, "it's the end."

She took it in silence for whatever he deemed it to be; but she spoke
otherwise after a minute. "You won't know, unless you've perhaps seen
him yourself, that Aunt Maud has been to him."

"Oh!" Densher exclaimed, with nothing to add to it.

"For real news," Kate herself after an instant added.

"She hasn't thought Mrs. Stringham's real?"

"It's perhaps only I who haven't. It was on Aunt Maud's trying again
three days ago to see him that she heard at his house of his having
gone. He had started I believe some days before."

"And won't then by this time be back?"

Kate shook her head. "She sent yesterday to know."

"He won't leave her then"--Densher had turned it over--"while she
lives. He'll stay to the end. He's magnificent."

"I think _she_ is," said Kate.

It had made them again look at each other long; and what it drew from
him rather oddly was: "Oh you don't know!"

"Well, she's after all my friend."

It was somehow, with her handsome demur, the answer he had least
expected of her; and it fanned with its breath, for a brief instant,
his old sense of her variety. "I see. You would have been sure of it.
You _were_ sure of it."

"Of course I was sure of