They came to it almost immediately; he was to wonder afterwards at the fewness of their steps. "She has turned her face to the wall."  
"You mean she's worse?"
 
The poor lady stood there as she had stopped; Densher had, in the instant of his eagerness, his curiosity, all responsive at sight of her, waved away, on the spot, the padrona, who had offered to relieve her of her mackintosh. She looked about through her wet veil, intensely alive now to the step she had taken and wishing it not to have been in the dark, but clearly, as yet, seeing nothing. "I don't know how she is—and it's why I've come to you."
 
"I'm glad enough you've come," he said, "and it's quite—you make me feel—as if I had been wretchedly waiting for you."
 
She showed him again her eyes—she had caught at his word. "Have you been wretched?"
 
Now, however, on his lips, the word expired. It would have sounded for him like a complaint, and before something he already made out in his visitor he knew his own trouble as small. Hers, under her damp draperies, which shamed his lack of a fire, was great, and he felt she had brought it all with her. He answered that he had been patient and above all that he had been still. "As still as a mouse—you'll have seen it for yourself. Stiller, for three days together, than I've ever been in my life. It has seemed to me the only thing."
 
This qualification of it as a policy or a remedy was straightway for his friend, he saw, a light that her own light could answer. "It has been best. I've wondered for you. But it has been best," she said again.
 
"Yet it has done no good?"
 
"I don't know. I've been afraid you were gone." Then as he gave a headshake which, though slow, was deeply mature: "You won't go?"
 
"Is to 'go,'" he asked, "to be still?"
 
"Oh I mean if you'll stay for me."
 
"I'll do anything for you. Isn't it for you alone now I can?"
 
She thought of it, and he could see even more of the relief she was taking from him. His presence, his face, his voice, the old rooms themselves, so meagre yet so charged, where Kate had admirably been to him—these things counted for her, now she had them, as the help she had been wanting: so that she still only stood there taking them all in. With it however popped up characteristically a of her conscience. What she thus tasted was almost a personal joy. It told Densher of the three days she on her side had spent. "Well, anything you do for me—is for her too. Only, only—!"
 
"Only nothing now matters?"
 
She looked at him a minute as if he were the fact itself that he expressed. "Then you know?"
 
"Is she dying?" he asked for all answer.
 
Mrs. Stringham waited—her face seemed to sound him. Then her own reply was strange. "She hasn't so much as named you. We haven't spoken."
 
"Not for three days?"
 
"No more," she simply went on, "than if it were all over. Not even by the faintest ."
 
"Oh," said Densher with more light, "you mean you haven't spoken about me?"
 
"About what else? No more than if you were dead."
 
"Well," he answered after a moment, "I am dead."
 
"Then I am," said Susan Shepherd with a drop of her arms on her .
 
It was a tone that, for the minute, imposed itself in its dry despair; it represented, in the place, which had no life of its own, none but the life Kate had left—the sense of which, for that matter, by mystic channels, might fairly be reaching the visitor—the very impotence of their . And Densher had nothing to oppose it withal, nothing but again: "Is she dying?"
 
It made her, however, as if these were crudities, almost material , only say as before: "Then you know?"
 
"Yes," he at last returned, "I know. But the to me is that you do. I've no right in fact to imagine or to assume that you do."
 
"You may," said Susan Shepherd, "all the same. I know."
 
"Everything?"
 
Her eyes, through her veil, kept pressing him. "No—not everything. That's why I've come."
 
"That I shall really tell you?" With which, as she hesitated and it him, he brought out in a a doubting "Oh, oh!" It turned him from her to the place itself, which was a part of what was in him, was the , the worn more than ever, of the fact in possession, the fact, now a thick association, for which he had hired it. That was not for telling, but Susan Shepherd was, none the less, so decidedly wonderful that the sense of it might really have begun, by an effect already operating, to be a part of her knowledge. He saw, and it stirred him, that she hadn't come to judge him; had come rather, so far as she might dare, to pity. This showed him her own abasement—that, at any rate, of grief; and made him feel with a rush of that he liked to be with her. The rush had quickened when she met his groan with an .
 
"We shall at all events—if that's anything—be together."
 
It was his own good impulse in herself. "It's what I've ventured to feel. It's much." She replied 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, . It was but another of the cases in which Kate was always showing. "You don't think then very 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 that the words she had just uttered to him were the one flower she had to throw. They were all her for him, and the consolation even still depended on the event. She sat with him at any rate in the grey , as sad as a winter dawn, made by their meeting. The image she again for him in it but the larger. "She has turned her face to the wall."
 
He saw with the last vividness, and it was as if, in their silences, they were simply so leaving what he saw. "She doesn't speak at all? I don't mean not of me."
 
"Of nothing—of no one." And she went on, Susan Shepherd, giving it out as she had had to take it. "She doesn't want to die. Think of her age. Think of her goodness. Think of her beauty. Think of all she is. Think of all she has. She lies there herself and clinging to it all. So I thank God—!" the poor lady wound up with a inconsequence.
 
He wondered. "You thank God—?"
 
"That she's so quiet."
 
He continued to wonder. "Is she so quiet?"
 
"She's more than quiet. She's grim. It's what she has never been. So you see—all these days. I can't tell you—but it's better so. It would kill me if she were to tell me."
 
"To tell you?" He was still at a loss.
 
"How she feels. How she clings. How she doesn't want it."
 
"How she doesn't want to die? Of course she doesn't want it." He had a long pause, and they might have been thinking together of what they could even now do to prevent it. This, however, was not what he brought out. Milly's "grimness" and the great hushed palace were present to him; present with the little woman before him as she must have been waiting there and listening. "Only, what harm have you done her?"
 
Mrs. Stringham looked about in her darkness. "I don't know. I come and talk of her here with you."
 
It made him again hesitate. "Does she hate me?"
 
"I don't know. How can I? No one ever will."
 
"She'll never tell?"
 
"She'll never tell."
 
Once more he thought. "She must be magnificent."
 
"She is magnificent."
 
His friend, after all, helped him, and he turned it, so far as he could, all over. "Would she see me again?"
 
It made his companion stare. "Should you like to see her?"
 
"You mean as you describe her?" He felt her surprise, and it took him some time. "No."
 
"Ah then!" Mrs. Stringham sighed.
 
"But if she could bear it I'd do anything."
 
She had for the moment her vision of this, but it . "I don't see what you can do."
 
"I don't either. But she might."
 
Mrs. Stringham continued to think. "It's too late."
 
"Too late for her to see—?"
 
"Too late."
 
The very decision of her despair—it was after all so lucid—kindled in him a heat. "But the doctor, all the while—?"
 
"Tacchini? Oh he's kind. He comes. He's proud of having been approved and coached by a great London man. He hardly in fact goes away; so that I scarce know what becomes of his other patients. He thinks her, justly enough, a great personage; he treats her like ; he's waiting on events. But she has barely consented to see him, and, though she has told him, generously—for she thinks of me, dear creature—that he may come, that he may stay, for my sake, he spends most of his time only at her door, prowling through the rooms, trying to entertain me, in that ghastly saloon, with the gossip of Venice, and meeting me, in , in the sala, on the staircase, with an agreeable intolerable smile. We don't," said Susan Shepherd, "talk of her."
 
"By her request?"
 
"Absolutely. I don't do what she doesn't wish. We talk of the price of provisions."
 
"By her request too?"
 
"Absolutely. She named it to me as a subject when she said, the first time, that if it would be any comfort to me he might stay as much as we liked."
 
Densher took it all in. "But he isn't any comfort to you!"
 
"None whatever. That, however," she added, "isn't his fault. Nothing's any comfort."
 
"Certainly," Densher observed, "as I but too horribly feel, I'm not."
 
"No. But I didn't come for that."
 
"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 , which he saw grow in her, from 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 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 of it, and she watched him while he helplessly moved. "There's one thing you can do. There's only that, and even for that there are difficulties. But there is that." He stood before her with his hands in his pockets, and he had soon enough, from her eyes, seen what was coming. She paused as if waiting for his leave to utter it, and as he only let her wait they heard in the silence, on the Canal, the renewed downpour of rain. She had at last to speak, but, as if still with her fear, she only half-. "I think you really know yourself what it is."
 
He did know what it was, and with it even, as she said—rather!—there were difficulties. He turned away on them, on everything, for a moment; he moved to the other window and looked at the sheeted channel, wider, like a river, where the houses opposite, blurred and , stood at twice their distance. Mrs. Stringham said nothing, was as mute in fact, for the minute, as if she had "had" him, and he was the first again to speak. When he did so, however, it was not in straight answer to her last remark—he only started from that. He said, as he came back to her, "Let me, you know, see—one must understand," almost as if he had for the time accepted it. And what he wished to understand was where, on the essence of the question, was the voice of Sir Luke Strett. If they talked of not giving her up shouldn't he be the one least of all to do it? "Aren't we, at the worst, in the dark without him?"
 
"Oh," said Mrs. Stringham, "it's he who has kept me going. I wired the first night, and he answered like an angel. He'll come like one. Only he can't arrive, at the nearest, till Thursday afternoon."
 
"Well then that's something."
 
She considered. "Something—yes. She likes him."
 
"Rather! I can see it still, the face with which, when he was here in October—that night when she was in white, when she had people there and those musicians—she committed him to my care. It was beautiful for both of us—she put us in relation. She asked me, for the time, to take him about; I did so, and we quite hit it off. That proved," Densher said with a quick sad smile, "that she liked him."
 
"He liked you," Susan Shepherd presently risked.
 
"Ah I know nothing about that."
 
"You ought to then. He went with you to galleries and churches; you saved his time for him, showed him the choicest things, and you perhaps will remember telling me myself that if he hadn't been a great surgeon he might really have been a great judge. I mean of the beautiful."
 
"Well," the young man admitted, "that's what he is—in having judged her. He hasn't," he went on, "judged her for nothing. His interest in her—which we must make the most of—can only be beneficent."
 
He still roamed, while he spoke, with his hands in his pockets, and she saw him, on this, as her eyes betrayed, trying to keep his distance from the recognition he had a few moments before partly confessed to. "I'm glad," she dropped, "you like him!"
 
There was something for him in the sound of it. "Well, I do no more, dear lady, than you do yourself. Surely you like him. Surely, when he was here, we all liked him."
 
"Yes, but I seem to feel I know what he thinks. And I should think, with all the time you spent with him, you'd know it," she said, "yourself."
 
Densher stopped short, though at first without a word. "We never spoke of her. Neither of us mentioned her, even to sound her name, and nothing whatever in connexion with her passed between us."
 
Mrs. Stringham stared up at him, surprised at this picture. But she had plainly an idea that after an instant resisted it. "That was his professional ."
 
". But it was also my sense of that in him, and it was something more besides." And he spoke with sudden . "I couldn't talk to him about her!"
 
"Oh!" said Susan Shepherd.
 
"I can't talk to any one about her."
 
"Except to me," his friend continued.
 
"Except to you." The ghost of her smile, a gleam of significance, had waited on her words, and it kept him, for honesty, looking at her. For honesty too—that is for his own words—he had quickly coloured: he was sinking so, at a stroke, the burden of his 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 attempted 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 her conclusion. "Then that proves what I say—that there were immensities between you. Otherwise you'd have ."
 
"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 took from her; but he came straight back to what he had original............