proper
corrective. They were on the edge of Christmas, but Christmas this year
was, as in the London of so many other years, disconcertingly mild; the
still air was soft, the thick light was grey, the great town looked
empty, and in the Park, where the grass was green, where the sheep
browsed, where the birds multitudinously twittered, the straight walks
lent themselves to slowness and the dim vistas to privacy. He held it
fast this morning till he had got out, his sacrifice to honour, and
then went with it to the nearest post-office and fixed it fast in a
telegram; thinking of it moreover as a sacrifice only because he had,
for reasons, felt it as an effort. Its character of effort it would owe
to Kate's expected resistance, not less probable than on the occasion
of past appeals; which was precisely why he--perhaps innocently--made
his telegram persuasive. It had, as a recall of tender hours, to be,
for the young woman at the counter, a trifle cryptic; but there was a
good deal of it in one way and another, representing as it did a rich
impulse and costing him a couple of shillings. There was also a moment
later on, that day, when, in the Park, as he measured watchfully one of
their old alleys, he might have been supposed by a cynical critic to be
reckoning his chance of getting his money back. He was waiting--but he
had waited of old; Lancaster Gate as a danger was practically at
hand--but she had risked that danger before. Besides it was smaller
now, with the queer turn of their affair; in spite of which indeed he
was graver as he lingered and looked out.

Kate came at last by the way he had thought least likely, came as if
she had started from the Marble Arch; but her advent was response--that
was the great matter; response marked in her face and agreeable to him,
even after Aunt Maud's responses, as nothing had been since his return
to London. She had not, it was true, answered his wire, and he had
begun to fear, as she was late, that with the instinct of what he might
be again intending to press upon her she had decided--though not with
ease--to deprive him of his chance. He would have of course, she knew,
other chances, but she perhaps saw the present as offering her special
danger. This, in fact, Densher could himself feel, was exactly why he
had so prepared it, and he had rejoiced, even while he waited, in all
that the conditions had to say to him of their simpler and better time.
The shortest day of the year