THE WINGS OF THE DOVE
plied in effect, silently, that it was whatever he liked; on which, so far as he had been afraid for anything, he knew his fear had dropped. The comfort was huge, for it gave back to him something precious, over which, in the effort of recovery, his own hand had too imperfectly closed. Kate, he remembered, had said to him, with her sole and single boldness—and also on grounds he hadn't then measured—that Mrs. Stringham was a person who wouldn't, at a pinch, in a stretch of confidence, wince. It was but another of the cases in which was Kate showing. "You don't think then very horridly of me?"
And her answer was the more valuable that it came without nervous effusion—quite as if she understood what he might conceivably have believed. She turned over in fact what she thought, and that was what helped him. "Oh, you've been extraordinary!"
It made him aware the next moment of how they had been planted there. She took off her cloak with his aid, though when she had also, accepting a seat, removed her veil, he recognised in her personal ravage that the words she had just uttered to him were the one flowers she had to throw. They were all her consolation for him, and the consolation, even, still depended on the event. She sat with him, at any rate, in the grey clearance—as sad as a winter dawn—made by their meeting. The image she again evoked for him loomed in it but the larger. "She has turned her face to the wall."
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