pect, after Milly's death, the silence as to the sense of
which, before that event, their agreement had been so deep. She had
answered him from Venice twice, and had had time to answer him twice
again from New York. The last letter of her four had come by the same
post as the document he sent on to Kate, but he hadn't gone into the
question of also enclosing that. His correspondence with Milly's
companion was somehow already presenting itself to him as a feature--as
a factor, he would have said in his newspaper--of the time whatever it
might be, long or short, in store for him; but one of his acutest
current thoughts was apt to be devoted to his not having yet mentioned
it to Kate. She had put him no question, no "Don't you ever hear?"--so
that he hadn't been brought to the point. This he described to himself
as a mercy, for he liked his secret. It was as a secret that, in the
same personal privacy, he described his transatlantic commerce, scarce
even wincing while he recognised it as the one connexion in which he
wasn't straight. He had in fact for this connexion a vivid mental
image--he saw it as a small emergent rock in the waste of waters, the
bottomless grey expanse of straightness. The fact that he had on
several recent occasions taken with Kate an out-of-the-way walk that
was each time to define itself as more remarkable for what they didn't
say than for what they did--this fact failed somehow to mitigate for
him a strange consciousness of exposure. There was something deep
within him that he had absolutely shown to no one--to the companion of
these walks in particular not a bit more than he could help; but he was
none the less haunted, under its shadow, with a dire apprehension of
publicity. It was as if he had invoked that ugliness in some stupid
good faith; and it was queer enough that on his emergent rock, clinging
to it and to Susan Shepherd, he should figure himself as hidden from
view. That represented no doubt his belief in her power, or in her
delicate disposition to protect him. Only Kate at all events knew--what
Kate did know, and she was also the last person interested to tell it;
in spite of which it was as if his _act_, so deeply associated with her
and never to be recalled nor recovered, was abroad on the winds of the
world. His honesty, as he viewed it with Kate, was the very element of
that menace: to the degree that he saw at moments, as to their final
impulse or their final remedy, the need to bu