ck precipitating for her what
has now happened, and anything that had occurred with him previously
for yourself. How in the world did he know we're engaged?"

V

Kate slowly rose; it was, since she had lighted the candles and sat
down, the first movement she had made. "Are you trying to fix it on me
that I must have told him?"

She spoke not so much in resentment as in pale dismay--which he showed
he immediately took in. "My dear child, I'm not trying to 'fix'
anything; but I'm extremely tormented and I seem not to understand.
What has the brute to do with us anyway?"

"What has he indeed?" Kate asked.

She shook her head as if in recovery, within the minute, of some mild
allowance for his unreason. There was in it--and for his reason
really--one of those half-inconsequent sweetnesses by which she had
often before made, over some point of difference, her own terms with
him. Practically she was making them now, and essentially he was
knowing it; yet inevitably, all the same, he was accepting it. She
stood there close to him, with something in her patience that suggested
her having supposed, when he spoke more appealingly, that he was going
to kiss her. He hadn't been, it appeared; but his continued appeal was
none the less the quieter. "What's he doing, from ten o'clock on
Christmas morning, with Mrs. Lowder?"

Kate looked surprised. "Didn't she tell you he's staying there?"

"At Lancaster Gate?" Densher's surprise met it. "'Staying'?--since
when?"

"Since day before yesterday. He was there before I came away." And then
she explained--confessing it in fact anomalous. "It's an accident--like
Aunt Maud's having herself remained in town for Christmas, but it isn't
after all so monstrous. _We_ stayed--and, with my having come here,
she's sorry now--because we neither of us, waiting from day to day for
the news you brought, seemed to want to be with a lot of people."

"You stayed for thinking of--Venice?"

"Of course we did. For what else? And even a little," Kate wonderfully
added--"it's true at least of Aunt Maud--for thinking of you."

He appreciated. "I see. Nice of you every way. But whom," he enquired,
"has Lord Mark stayed for thinking of?"

"His being in London, I believe, is a very commonplace matter. He has
some rooms which he has had suddenly some rather advantageous chance to
let--such as, with his confessed, his decidedly proclaimed want of
money, he hasn't had it in him, in spite of everything,