and
clung to you but the more. For that was your strength, my dear
man--that she loves you with passion."

"Oh my 'strength'!" Densher coldly murmured.

"Otherwise, since she had sent for you, what was it to ask of you?" And
then--quite without irony--as he waited a moment to say: "Was it just
once more to look at you?"

"She had nothing to ask of me--nothing, that is, but not to stay any
longer. She did to that extent want to see me. She had supposed at
first--after he had been with her--that I had seen the propriety of
taking myself off. Then since I hadn't--seeing my propriety as I did in
another way--she found, days later, that I was still there. This," said
Densher, "affected her."

"Of course it affected her."

Again she struck him, for all her dignity, as glib. "If it was somehow
for _her_ I was still staying, she wished that to end, she wished me to
know how little there was need of it. And as a manner of farewell she
wished herself to tell me so."

"And she did tell you so?"

"Face-to-face, yes. Personally, as she desired."

"And as _you_ of course did."

"No, Kate," he returned with all their mutual consideration; "not as I
did. I hadn't desired it in the least."

"You only went to oblige her?"

"To oblige her. And of course also to oblige you."

"Oh for myself certainly I'm glad."

"'Glad'?"--he echoed vaguely the way it rang out.

"I mean you did quite the right thing. You did it especially in having
stayed. But that was all?" Kate went on. "That you mustn't wait?"

"That was really all--and in perfect kindness."

"Ah kindness naturally: from the moment she asked of you such a--well,
such an effort. That you mustn't wait--that was the point," Kate
added--"to see her die."

"That was the point, my dear," Densher said.

"And it took twenty minutes to make it?"

He thought a little. "I didn't time it to a second. I paid her the
visit--just like another."

"Like another person?"

"Like another visit."

"Oh!" said Kate. Which had apparently the effect of slightly arresting
his speech--an arrest she took advantage of to continue; making with it
indeed her nearest approach to an enquiry of the kind against which he
had braced himself. "Did she receive you--in her condition--in her
room?"

"Not she," said Merton Densher. "She received me just as usual: in that
glorious great _salone_, in the dress she always wears, from her
inveterate corner of her sofa." And his face for the moment c