" Which sounded indeed vaguer still.

She waited a moment. "Is it, as you say for my own business, anything
very awful?"

"Well," he slowly replied, "you'll tell me if you find it so. I mean if
you find my idea--"

He was so slow that she took him up. "Awful?" A sound of
impatience--the form of a laugh--at last escaped her. "I can't find it
anything at all till I know what you're talking about."

It brought him then more to the point, though it did so at first but by
making him, on the hearthrug before her, with his hands in his pockets,
turn awhile to and fro. There rose in him even with this movement a
recall of another time--the hour in Venice, the hour of gloom and
storm, when Susan Shepherd had sat in his quarters there very much as
Kate was sitting now, and he had wondered, in pain even as now, what he
might say and mightn't. Yet the present occasion after all was somehow
the easier. He tried at any rate to attach that feeling to it while he
stopped before his companion. "The communication I speak of can't
possibly belong--so far as its date is concerned--to these last days.
The postmark, which is legible, does; but it isn't thinkable, for
anything else, that she wrote--!" He dropped, looking at her as if
she'd understand.

It was easy to understand. "On her deathbed?" But Kate took an
instant's thought. "Aren't we agreed that there was never any one in
the world like her?"

"Yes." And looking over her head he spoke clearly enough. "There was
never any one in the world like her."

Kate, from her chair, always without a movement, raised her eyes to the
unconscious reach of his own. Then when the latter again dropped to her
she added a question. "And won't it further depend a little on what the
communication is?"

"A little perhaps--but not much. It's a communication," said Densher.

"Do you mean a letter?"

"Yes, a letter. Addressed to me in her hand--in hers unmistakeably."

Kate thought. "Do you know her hand very well?"

"Oh perfectly."

It was as if his tone for this prompted--with a slight strangeness--her
next demand. "Have you had many letters from her?"

"No. Only three notes." He spoke looking straight at her. "And very,
very short ones."

"Ah," said Kate, "the number doesn't matter. Three lines would be
enough if you're sure you remember."

"I'm sure I remember. Besides," Densher continued, "I've seen her hand
in other ways. I seem to recall how you once, before she went to
Venice, s