case
for surgery?"

"I dare say it may be; that is that if it comes to anything it may come
to that. Of course she's in the highest hands."

"The doctors are after her then?"

"She's after _them_--it's the same thing. I think I'm free to say it
now--she sees Sir Luke Strett."

It made him quickly wince. "Ah fifty thousand knives!" Then after an
instant: "One seems to guess."

Yes, but she waved it away. "Don't guess. Only do as I tell you."

For a moment now, in silence, he took it all in, might have had it
before him. "What you want of me then is to make up to a sick girl."

"Ah but you admit yourself that she doesn't affect you as sick. You
understand moreover just how much--and just how little."

"It's amazing," he presently answered, "what you think I understand."

"Well, if you've brought me to it, my dear," she returned, "that has
been your way of breaking _me_ in. Besides which, so far as making up
to her goes, plenty of others will."

Densher for a little, under this suggestion, might have been seeing
their young friend on a pile of cushions and in a perpetual tea-gown,
amid flowers and with drawn blinds, surrounded by the higher nobility.
"Others can follow their tastes. Besides, others are free."

"But so are you, my dear!"

She had spoken with impatience, and her suddenly quitting him had
sharpened it; in spite of which he kept his place, only looking up at
her. "You're prodigious!"

"Of course I'm prodigious!"--and, as immediately happened, she gave a
further sign of it that he fairly sat watching. The door from the lobby
had, as she spoke, been thrown open for a gentleman who, immediately
finding her within his view, advanced to greet her before the
announcement of his name could reach her companion. Densher none the
less felt himself brought quickly into relation; Kate's welcome to the
visitor became almost precipitately an appeal to her friend, who slowly
rose to meet it. "I don't know whether you know Lord Mark." And then
for the other party: "Mr. Merton Densher--who has just come back from
America."

"Oh!" said the other party while Densher said nothing--occupied as he
mainly was on the spot with weighing the sound in question. He
recognised it in a moment as less imponderable than it might have
appeared, as having indeed positive claims. It wasn't, that is, he
knew, the "Oh!" of the idiot, however great the superficial
resemblance: it was that of the clever, the accomplished man; it