atched her, hadn't made
for her a medium involving compunction in the spectator, so, by the
same stroke, that became the very fact of her relation with her
companions there, such a fact as filled him at once, oddly, both with
assurance and with suspense. If he himself, on this brief vision, felt
her as alien and as ever so unwittingly ironic, how must they not feel
her and how above all must she not feel them?

Densher could ask himself that even after she had presently lighted the
tall candles on the mantel-shelf. This was all their illumination but
the fire, and she had proceeded to it with a quiet dryness that yet
left play, visibly, to her implication between them, in their trouble
and failing anything better, of the presumably genial Christmas hearth.
So far as the genial went this had in strictness, given their
conditions, to be all their geniality. He had told her in his note
nothing but that he must promptly see her and that he hoped she might
be able to make it possible; but he understood from the first look at
her that his promptitude was already having for her its principal
reference. "I was prevented this morning, in the few minutes," he
explained, "asking Mrs. Lowder if she had let you know, though I rather
gathered she had; and it's what I've been in fact since then assuming.
It was because I was so struck at the moment with your having, as she
did tell me, so suddenly come here."

"Yes, it was sudden enough." Very neat and fine in the contracted
firelight, with her hands in her lap, Kate considered what he had said.
He had spoken immediately of what had happened at Sir Luke Strett's
door. "She has let me know nothing. But that doesn't matter--if it's
what _you_ mean."

"It's part of what I mean," Densher said; but what he went on with,
after a pause during which she waited, was apparently not the rest of
that. "She had had her telegram from Mrs. Stringham; late last night.
But to me the poor lady hasn't wired. The event," he added, "will have
taken place yesterday, and Sir Luke, starting immediately, one can see,
and travelling straight, will get back to-morrow morning. So that Mrs.
Stringham, I judge, is left to face in some solitude the situation
bequeathed to her. But of course," he wound up, "Sir Luke couldn't
stay."

Her look at him might have had in it a vague betrayal of the sense that
he was gaining time. "Was your telegram from Sir Luke?"

"No--I've had no telegram."

She wondered. "But n