Page:The Wings of the Dove (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1902), Volume 2.djvu/359

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THE WINGS OF THE DOVE

wasn't through anything you did—whatever that may have been—that she gained her certainty. It was by the conviction she got from me."

"Oh, it's very handsome," Densher said, "for you to take your share!"

"Do you suppose," Kate asked, "I think of denying it?"

Her look and her tone made him, for the instant, regret his comment, which indeed had been the first that rose to his lips as an effect, absolutely, of what they would have called between them her straightness. Her straightness, visibly, was all his own loyalty could ask. Still, that was comparatively beside the mark. "Of course I don't suppose anything but that we're together in our recognitions, our responsibilities—whatever we choose to call them. It isn't a question for us of apportioning shares or distinguishing invidiously among such impressions as it was our idea to give."

"It wasn't your idea to give impressions," said Kate.

He met this with a smile that he himself felt, in its strained character, as queer. "Don't go into that!"

It was perhaps not as going into it then that she had another idea—an idea born, as she showed, of the vision he had just evoked. "Wouldn't it have been possible then to deny the truth of the information? I mean of Lord Mark's."

Densher wondered. "Possible for whom?"

"Why, for you."

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