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By Root 16413 0

’t there he had wished to see her; yet if she was there he couldn’t pretend not to. What he had however the next moment made out was that if some one was there it wasn’t Kate Croy. It was, with a sensible shock for him, the person who had last offered him a conscious face from behind the clear plate of a café in Venice. The great glass at Florian’s was a medium less obscure, even with the window down, than the air of London Christmas; yet at present also, none the less, between the two men, an exchange of recognitions could occur. Densher felt his own look a gaping arrest—which, he disgustedly remembered, his back as quickly turned, appeared to repeat itself as his special privilege. He mounted the steps of the house and touched the bell with a keen consciousness of being habitually looked at by Kate’s friend from positions of almost insolent vantage. He forgot for the time the moment when, in Venice, at the palace, the encouraged young man had in a manner assisted at the departure of the disconcerted, since Lord Mark was not looking disconcerted now any more than he had looked from his bench at his café. Densher was thinking that he seemed to show as vagrant while another was ensconced. He was thinking of the other as—in spite of the difference of situation—more ensconced than ever; he was thinking of him above all as the friend of the person with whom his recognition had, the minute previous, associated him. The man was seated in the very place in which, beside Mrs. Lowder’s, he had looked to find Kate, and that was a sufficient identity. Meanwhile at any rate the door of the house had opened and Mrs. Lowder stood before him. It was something at least that she wasn’t Kate. She was herself, on the spot, in all her affluence; with presence of mind both to decide at once that Lord Mark, in the brougham, didn’t matter and to prevent Sir Luke’s butler, by a firm word thrown over her shoulder, from standing there to listen to her passage with the gentleman who had rung. “I’ll tell Mr. Densher; you needn’t wait!” And the passage, promptly and richly, took place on the steps.

“He arrives, travelling straight, to-morrow early. I couldn’t not come to learn.”

“No more,” said Densher simply, “could I. On my way,” he added, “to Lancaster Gate.”

“Sweet of you.” She beamed on him dimly, and he saw her face was attuned. It made him, with what she had just before said, know all, and he took the thing in while he met the air of portentous, of almost functional, sympathy that had settled itself as her medium with him and that yet had now a fresh glow. “So you have your message?”

He knew so well what she meant, and so equally with it what he “had had” no less than what he hadn’t, that, with but the smallest hesitation, he strained the point. “Yes—my message.”

“Our dear dove then, as Kate calls her, has folded her wonderful wings.”

“Yes—folded them.”

It rather racked him, but he tried to receive it as she intended, and she evidently took his formal assent for self-control. “Unless it’s more true,” she accordingly added, “that she has spread them the wider.”

He again but formally assented, though, strangely enough, the words fitted a figure deep in his own imagination. “Rather, yes—spread them the wider.”

“For a flight, I trust, to some happiness greater—!”

“Exactly. Greater,” Densher broke in; but now with a look, he feared, that did a little warn her off.

“You were certainly,” she went on with more reserve, “entitled to direct news. Ours came late last night: I’m not sure otherwise, I shouldn’t have gone to you. But you’re coming,” she asked, “to me?”

He had had a minute by this time to think further, and the window of the brougham was still within range. Her rich “me,” reaching him moreover through the mild damp, had the effect of a thump on his chest. “Squared,” Aunt Maud? She was indeed squared, and the extent of it just now perversely enough took away his breath. His look from where they stood embraced the aperture at which the person sitting in the carriage might have shown, and he saw his interlocutress, on her side, understand the question in it, which he moreover then uttered.