Page:The Wings of the Dove (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1902), Volume 2.djvu/349

 XXXIII

it has been—what do you say? a whole fortnight?—without your making a sign?"

Kate put that to him distinctly, in the December dusk of Lancaster Gate, and on the matter of the time he had been back; but he saw with it, straightway, that she was as admirably true as ever to her instinct—which was a system as well—of not admitting the possibility between them of small resentments, of trifles to trip up their general trust. That by itself, the renewed beauty of it, would, at this fresh sight of her, have stirred him to his depths if something else, something no less vivid, but quite separate, hadn't stirred him still more. It was in seeing her that he felt what their interruption had been, and that they met across it even as persons whose adventures, on either side, in time and space, of the nature of perils and exiles, had had a peculiar strangeness. He wondered if he were as different for her as she herself had immediately appeared: which was but his way indeed of taking it in, with his thrill, that—even going by the mere first look—she had never been so 339