of hers is an appeal to Densher, so much is clear in all her looks and
tones. There is only one way to save Milly, to restore to Milly, not
indeed her life, but her desire of it. Densher has it in his power to
make her wish to live again, and that is all that he or any one else
could achieve for her. The thought is between him and the good woman
as they talk; the dialogue, with its allusions and broken phrases,
slowly shapes itself to the form of the suppressed appeal. It hangs in
the air, almost visibly, before it is uttered at all; and by that time
a word is enough, one stroke, and the nature of the appeal and all its
implications are in view. The scene has embodied it; the cheerless
little room and the falling light and Densher's uneasy movements and
Susan's flushed, rain-splashed earnestness have all contributed; the
broken phrases, without touching it, have travelled about it and
revealed its contour. Densher might tell Milly that she is wrong,
might convince her that he and Kate have not beguiled and misled her
as she supposes; Densher, in other words, might mislead her again, and
Mrs. Stringham entreats him to do so. That is why she has come, and
such is the image which has been gradually created, and which at last
is actual and palpable in the scene. It has not appeared as a
statement or an announcement; Susan's appeal and Densher's tormented
response to it are _felt_, establishing their presence as matters
which the reader has lived with for the time. They have emerged out
of the surface of the scene into form and relief.

And finally the subject of the whole book is rendered in the same way.
The subject is not in Milly herself, but in her effect upon the
relation existing between Densher and Kate. At the beginning of the
book these two are closely allied, and by the end their understanding
has been crossed by something that has changed it for ever. Milly has
come and gone, nothing is afterwards the same. Their scheme has been
successful, for Milly in dying has bequeathed a fortune to Densher.
But also she has bequeathed the memory of her last signal to them,
which was one that neither could foresee and which the man at any rate
could never forget. For Densher had _not_ practised that final
disloyalty which was begged of him, and Milly had died in full
knowledge of their design, and yet she had forgiven, dove-like to the
end, and her forgiveness stands between them. Kate recognizes it in
the word on which the