rful manner, the manner of at once having it
all before her and yet keeping it all at its distance. "She wouldn't
see you?"

"Not after your friend had been with her."

She hesitated. "Couldn't you write?"

It made him also think, but with a difference. "She had turned her face
to the wall."

This again for a moment hushed her, and they were both too grave now
for parenthetic pity. But her interest came out for at least the
minimum of light. "She refused even to let you speak to her?"

"My dear girl," Densher returned, "she was miserably, prohibitively
ill."

"Well, that was what she had been before."

"And it didn't prevent? No," Densher admitted, "it didn't; and I don't
pretend that she's not magnificent."

"She's prodigious," said Kate Croy.

He looked at her a moment. "So are you, my dear. But that's how it is,"
he wound up; "and there we are."

His idea had been in advance that she would perhaps sound him much more
deeply, asking him above all two or three specific things. He had
fairly fancied her even wanting to know and trying to find out how far,
as the odious phrase was, he and Milly had gone, and how near, by the
same token, they had come. He had asked himself if he were prepared to
hear her do that, and had had to take for answer that he was prepared
of course for everything. Wasn't he prepared for her ascertaining if
her two or three prophecies had found time to be made true? He had
fairly believed himself ready to say whether or no the overture on
Milly's part promised according to the boldest of them had taken place.
But what was in fact blessedly coming to him was that so far as such
things were concerned his readiness wouldn't be taxed. Kate's pressure
on the question of what had taken place remained so admirably general
that even her present enquiry kept itself free of sharpness. "So then
that after Lord Mark's interference you never again met?"

It was what he had been all the while coming to. "No; we met once--so
far as it could be called a meeting. I had stayed--I didn't come away."

"That," said Kate, "was no more than decent."

"Precisely"--he felt himself wonderful; "and I wanted to be no less.
She sent for me, I went to her, and that night I left Venice."

His companion waited. "Wouldn't _that_ then have been your chance?"

"To refute Lord Mark's story? No, not even if before her there I had
wanted to. What did it signify either? She was dying."

"Well," Kate in a manner pers