ime to prevent it?" She smiled, but he saw her the
next instant as smiling through tears; and the instant after this she
had got, in respect to the particular point, quite off. She had come
back to another, which was one of her own; her own were so closely
connected that Densher's were at best but parenthetic. Still she had a
distance to go. "You do then see your way?" She put it to him before
they joined--as was high time--the others. And she made him understand
she meant his way with Milly.

He had dropped a little in presence of the explanation; then she had
brought him up to a sort of recognition. He could make out by this
light something of what he saw, but a dimness also there was,
undispelled since his return. "There's something you must definitely
tell me. If our friend knows that all the while--?"

She came straight to his aid, formulating for him his anxiety, though
quite to smooth it down. "All the while she and I here were growing
intimate, you and I were in unmentioned relation? If she knows that,
yes, she knows our relation must have involved your writing to me."

"Then how could she suppose you weren't answering?"

"She doesn't suppose it."

"How then can she imagine you never named her?"

"She doesn't. She knows now I did name her. I've told her everything.
She's in possession of reasons that will perfectly do."

Still he just brooded. "She takes things from you exactly as I take
them?"

"Exactly as you take them."

"She's just such another victim?"

"Just such another. You're a pair."

"Then if anything happens," said Densher, "we can console each other?"

"Ah something _may_ indeed happen," she returned, "if you'll only go
straight!"

He watched the others an instant through the window. "What do you mean
by going straight?"

"Not worrying. Doing as you like. Try, as I've told you before, and
you'll see. You'll have me perfectly, always, to refer to."

"Oh rather, I hope! But if she's going away?"

It pulled Kate up but a moment. "I'll bring her back. There you are.
You won't be able to say I haven't made it smooth for you."

He faced it all, and certainly it was queer. But it wasn't the
queerness that after another minute was uppermost. He was in a wondrous
silken web, and it was amusing. "You spoil me!"

He wasn't sure if Mrs. Lowder, who at this juncture reappeared, had
caught his word as it dropped from him; probably not, he thought, her
attention being given to Mrs. Stringham