Page:The Wings of the Dove (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1902), Volume 2.djvu/283

 herself before he could protest. "You stay because you've got to."

He grasped at it. "I stay because I've got to." And he couldn't have said when he had uttered it if it were loyal to Kate or disloyal. It gave her, in a manner, away; it showed the tip of the ear of her plan. Yet Milly took it, he perceived, but as a plain statement of his truth. He was waiting for what Kate would have told her of—the permission, from Lancaster Gate, to come any nearer. To remain friends with either niece or aunt he mustn't stir without it. All this Densher read in the girl's sense of the spirit of his reply; so that it made him feel he was lying, and he had to think of something to correct it. What he thought of was, in an instant, "Isn't it enough, whatever may be one's other complications, to stay, after all, for you?"

"Oh, you must judge."

He was on his feet, by this time, to take leave, and also because he was at last too restless. The speech in question, at least, wasn't disloyal to Kate; that was the very tone of their bargain. So was it, by being loyal, another kind of lie, the lie of the uncandid profession of a motive. He was staying so little "for" Milly that he was staying positively against her. He didn't, none the less, know, and at last, thank goodness, he didn't care. The only thing he could say might make it either better or worse. "Well then, so long as I don't go, you must think of me all as judging!" 273