most
wonderful!" she exclaimed as she rather too profusely--a sign her
friend noticed--ladled tea into the pot. He watched her a moment at
this occupation, coming nearer the table while she put in the steaming
water. "You'll have some?"

He hesitated. "Hadn't we better wait--?"

"For Aunt Maud?" She saw what he meant--the deprecation, by their old
law, of betrayals of the intimate note. "Oh you needn't mind now. We've
done it!"

"Humbugged her?"

"Squared her. You've pleased her."

Densher mechanically accepted his tea. He was thinking of something
else, and his thought in a moment came out. "What a brute then I must
be!"

"A brute--?"

"To have pleased so many people."

"Ah," said Kate with a gleam of gaiety, "you've done it to please
_me_." But she was already, with her gleam, reverting a little. "What I
don't understand is--won't you have any sugar?"

"Yes, please."

"What I don't understand," she went on when she had helped him, "is
what it was that had occurred to bring her round again. If she gave you
up for days and days, what brought her back to you?"

She asked the question with her own cup in her hand, but it found him
ready enough in spite of his sense of the ironic oddity of their going
into it over the tea-table. "It was Sir Luke Strett who brought her
back. His visit, his presence there did it."

"He brought her back then to life."

"Well, to what I saw."

"And by interceding for you?"

"I don't think he interceded. I don't indeed know what he did."

Kate wondered. "Didn't he tell you?"

"I didn't ask him. I met him again, but we practically didn't speak of
her."

Kate stared. "Then how do you know?"

"I see. I feel. I was with him again as I had been before--"

"Oh and you pleased him too? That was it?"

"He understood," said Densher.

"But understood what?"

He waited a moment. "That I had meant awfully well."

"Ah, and made _her_ understand? I see," she went on as he said nothing.
"But how did he convince her?"

Densher put down his cup and turned away. "You must ask Sir Luke."

He stood looking at the fire and there was a time without sound. "The
great thing," Kate then resumed, "is that she's satisfied. Which," she
continued, looking across at him, "is what I've worked for."

"Satisfied to die in the flower of her youth?"

"Well, at peace with you."

"Oh 'peace'!" he murmured with his eyes on the fire.

"The peace of having loved."

He raised his eyes to he