'my' seal, my dear; and my
intention--which my note tried to express--was all to treat it to you
as not mine."

"Do you mean that it's to that extent mine then?"

"Well, let us call it, if we like, theirs--that of the good people in
New York, the authors of our communication. If the seal is broken well
and good; but we _might_, you know," he presently added, "have sent it
back to them intact and inviolate. Only accompanied," he smiled with
his heart in his mouth, "by an absolutely kind letter."

Kate took it with the mere brave blink with which a patient of courage
signifies to the exploring medical hand that the tender place is
touched. He saw on the spot that she was prepared, and with this signal
sign that she was too intelligent not to be, came a flicker of
possibilities. She was--merely to put it at that--intelligent enough
for anything. "Is it what you're proposing we _should_ do?"

"Ah it's too late to do it--well, ideally. Now, with that sign that we
_know_--!"

"But you don't know," she said very gently.

"I refer," he went on without noticing it, "to what would have been the
handsome way. Its being dispatched again, with no cognisance taken but
one's assurance of the highest consideration, and the proof of this in
the state of the envelope--_that_ would have been really satisfying."

She thought an instant. "The state of the envelope proving refusal, you
mean, not to be based on the insufficiency of the sum?"

Densher smiled again as for the play, however whimsical, of her humour.
"Well yes--something of that sort."

"So that if cognisance _has_ been taken--so far as I'm concerned--it
spoils the beauty?"

"It makes the difference that I'm disappointed in the hope--which I
confess I entertained--that you'd bring the thing back to me as you had
received it."

"You didn't express that hope in your letter."

"I didn't want to. I wanted to leave it to yourself. I wanted--oh yes,
if that's what you wish to ask me--to see what you'd do."

"You wanted to measure the possibilities of my departure from delicacy?"

He continued steady now; a kind of ease--from the presence, as in the
air, of something he couldn't yet have named--had come to him. "Well, I
wanted--in so good a case--to test you."

She was struck--it showed in her face--by his expression. "It _is_ a
good case. I doubt whether a better," she said with her eyes on him,
"has ever been known."

"The better the case then the better the test!"