THE WINGS OF THE DOVE
"You came for me."
"Well, then, call it that." But she looked at him a moment with eyes filled full, and something came up in her, the next instant, from deeper still. "I came at bottom of course———"
"You came at bottom of course for our friend herself. But if it's, as you say, too late for me to do anything?"
She continued to look at him, and with an impatience, which he saw growing in her, of the truth itself. "So I did say. But, with you here"—and she turned her vision again strangely about her—"with you here, and with everything, I feel that we mustn't abandon her."
"God forbid we should abandon her."
"Then you won't?" His tone had made her flush again.
"How do you mean I 'won't,' if she abandons me? What can I do if she won't see me?"
"But you said just now you wouldn't like it."
"I said I shouldn't like it in the light of what you tell me. I shouldn't like it only to see her as you make me. I should like it if I could help her. But even then," Densher pursued without faith, "she would have to want it first herself. And there," he continued to make out, "is the devil of it. She won't want it herself. She can't!"
He had got up in his impatience of it, and she watched him while he helplessly moved. "There's one thing you can do. There's only that, and even
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