u to take your share!"

"Do you suppose," Kate asked, "that I think of denying it?"

Her look and her tone made him for the instant regret his comment,
which indeed had been the first that rose to his lips as an effect
absolutely of what they would have called between them her
straightness. Her straightness, visibly, was all his own loyalty could
ask. Still, that was comparatively beside the mark. "Of course I don't
suppose anything but that we're together in our recognitions, our
responsibilities--whatever we choose to call them. It isn't a question
for us of apportioning shares or distinguishing invidiously among such
impressions as it was our idea to give."

"It wasn't _your_ idea to give impressions," said Kate.

He met this with a smile that he himself felt, in its strained
character, as queer. "Don't go into that!"

It was perhaps not as going into it that she had another idea--an idea
born, she showed, of the vision he had just evoked. "Wouldn't it have
been possible then to deny the truth of the information? I mean of Lord
Mark's."

Densher wondered. "Possible for whom?"

"Why for you."

"To tell her he lied?"

"To tell her he's mistaken."

Densher stared--he was stupefied; the "possible" thus glanced at by
Kate being exactly the alternative he had had to face in Venice and to
put utterly away from him. Nothing was stranger than such a difference
in their view of it. "And to lie myself, you mean, to do it? We _are_,
my dear child," he said, "I suppose, still engaged."

"Of course we're still engaged. But to save her life--!"

He took in for a little the way she talked of it. Of course, it was to
be remembered, she had always simplified, and it brought back his sense
of the degree in which, to her energy as compared with his own, many
things were easy; the very sense that so often before had moved him to
admiration. "Well, if you must know--and I want you to be clear about
it--I didn't even seriously think of a denial to her face. The question
of it--_as_ possibly saving her--was put to me definitely enough; but
to turn it over was only to dismiss it. Besides," he added, "it
wouldn't have done any good."

"You mean she would have had no faith in your correction?" She had
spoken with a promptitude that affected him of a sudden as almost glib;
but he himself paused with the overweight of all he meant, and she
meanwhile went on. "Did you try?"

"I hadn't even a chance."

Kate maintained her wonde