THE WINGS OF THE DOVE
"I shall come back."
"Then she's better?"
"I shall come back within the month," Sir Luke repeated without heeding the question. He had dropped Densher's hand, but he held him otherwise still. "I bring you a message from Miss Theale," he said as if they had not spoken of her. "I'm commissioned to ask you from her to go and see her."
Densher's rebound from his supposition had a violence that his stare betrayed. "She asks me?"
Sir Luke had got into the carriage, the door of which the guard had closed; but he spoke again as he stood at the window, bending a little but not leaning out. "She told me she would like it, and I promised that, as I expected to find you here, I would let you know."
Densher, on the platform, took it from him, but what he took brought the blood into his face quite as what he had had to take from Mrs. Stringham. And he was also bewildered. "Then she can receive———?"
"She can receive you."
"And you're coming back———?"
"Oh, because I must. She's not to move. She's to stay. I come to her."
"I see, I see," said Densher, who indeed did see—saw the sense of his friend's words and saw beyond it as well. What Mrs. Stringham had announced, and what he had yet expected not to have to face, had then come. Sir Luke had kept it for the last, but
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