Page:The Wings of the Dove (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1902), Volume 2.djvu/339

 which Sir Luke finally stood before him again. For stand before him again he finally did; just when our friend had gloomily embraced the belief that the limit of his power to absent himself from London obligations would have been reached. Four or five days, exclusive of journeys, represented the largest supposable sacrifice—to a head not crowned—on the part of one of the highest medical lights in the world; so that, really, when the personage in question, following up a tinkle of the bell, solidly rose in the doorway, it was to impose on Densher a vision that for the instant cut like a knife. It spoke, the fact, in a single dreadful word, of the magnitude—he shrank from calling it anything else—of Milly's case. The great man had not gone then, and an immense surrender to her immense need was so expressed in it that some effect, some help, some hope, were, flagrantly, part of the expression. It was for Densher, with his reaction from disappointment, as if he were conscious of ten things at once—the foremost being that, just conceivably, since Sir Luke was still there, she had been saved. Close upon its heels, however, and quite as sharply came the sense that the crisis—plainly, even now, to be prolonged for him—was to have none of that sound simplicity. Not only had his visitor not dropped in to gossip about Milly, he had not dropped in to mention her at all; he had dropped in fairly to show that during the brief remainder of his stay, the end of which was now in sight, as little as possible of that was to be 329