isted, "why not just _because_ she was
dying?" She had however all her discretion. "But of course I know that
seeing her you could judge."

"Of course seeing her I could judge. And I did see her! If I had denied
you moreover," Densher said with his eyes on her, "I'd have stuck to
it."

She took for a moment the intention of his face. "You mean that to
convince her you'd have insisted or somehow proved--?"

"I mean that to convince _you_ I'd have insisted or somehow proved--!"

Kate looked for her moment at a loss. "To convince 'me'?"

"I wouldn't have made my denial, in such conditions, only to take it
back afterwards."

With this quickly light came for her, and with it also her colour
flamed. "Oh you'd have broken with me to make your denial a truth?
You'd have 'chucked' me"--she embraced it perfectly--"to save your
conscience?"

"I couldn't have done anything else," said Merton Densher. "So you see
how right I was not to commit myself, and how little I could dream of
it. If it ever again appears to you that I _might_ have done so,
remember what I say."

Kate again considered, but not with the effect at once to which he
pointed. "You've fallen in love with her."

"Well then say so--with a dying woman. Why need you mind and what does
it matter?"

It came from him, the question, straight out of the intensity of
relation and the face-to-face necessity into which, from the first,
from his entering the room, they had found themselves thrown; but it
gave them their most extraordinary moment. "Wait till she is dead! Mrs.
Stringham," Kate added, "is to telegraph." After which, in a tone still
different, "For what then," she asked, "did Milly send for you?"

"It was what I tried to make out before I went. I must tell you
moreover that I had no doubt of its really being to give me, as you
say, a chance. She believed, I suppose, that I _might_ deny; and what,
to my own mind, was before me in going to her was the certainty that
she'd put me to my test. She wanted from my own lips--so I saw it--the
truth. But I was with her for twenty minutes, and she never asked me
for it."

"She never wanted the truth"--Kate had a high headshake. "She wanted
_you_. She would have taken from you what you could give her and been
glad of it, even if she had known it false. You might have lied to her
from pity, and she have seen you and felt you lie, and yet--since it
was all for tenderness--she would have thanked you and blessed you