THE WINGS OF THE DOVE
coloured: he was sinking so, at a stroke, the burden of his discourse with Kate. His visitor, for the minute, while their eyes met, might have been watching him hold it down. And he had to hold it down—the effort of which, precisely, made him red. He couldn't let it come up; at least not yet. She might make what she would of it. He attemped to repeat his statement, but he really modified it. "Sir Luke, at all events, had nothing to tell me, and I had nothing to tell him. Make-believe talk was impossible for us, and———"
"And real"—she had taken him right up with a huge emphasis—"was more impossible still." No doubt he didn't deny it; and she had straightway drawn her conclusion. "Then that proves what I say—that there were immensities between you. Otherwise you'd have chattered."
"I dare say," Densher granted, "we were both thinking of her."
"You were neither of you thinking of any one else. That's why you kept together."
Well, that too, if she desired, he admitted; but he came straight back to what he had originally said. "I haven't a notion, all the same, of what he thinks." She faced him, visibly, with the question into which he had already observed that her special shade of earnestness was perpetually, right and left, flowering—"Are you very sure?"—and he could only note her apparent difference from himself. "You, I judge, believe that he thinks she's gone."
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