THE WINGS OF THE DOVE
and how he would describe it; that would quite do for her—it even would have done for her, he could see, had he produced some reason merely common, had he said he was waiting for money, or for clothes, or for letters, or for orders from Fleet Street, without which, as she might have heard, newspaper men never took a step. He hadn't, in the event, quite sunk to that; but he had none the less had three with her, that night, on Mrs. Stringham's leaving them alone—Mrs. Stringham proved really prodigious—his acquaintance with a shade of awkwardness darker than any Milly could know. He had supposed himself, beforehand, on the question of what he was doing or pretending, in possession of some tone that would serve; but there were three minutes in which he found himself incapable of promptness quite as a gentleman whose pocket has been picked finds himself incapable of purchase. It even didn't help him, oddly, that he was sure Kate would in some way have spoken for him—or, rather, not so much in some way as in one very particular way. He hadn't asked her, at the last, what she might, in the connection, have said; nothing would have induced him to ask, after she had been to see him: his lips were so sealed by that passage, his spirit in fact so hushed, in respect to any charge upon her freedom. There was something he could only therefore read back into the probabilities, and when he left the palace, an hour afterwards, it was with a sense of having breathed there, in the very air, the truth he imagined.
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