Page:The Wings of the Dove (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1902), Volume 2.djvu/363

 said with his eyes on her, "I would have stuck to it."

She took for a moment the intention of his face. "You mean that, to convince her, you would have insisted or somehow proved?"

"I mean that, to convince you, I would have insisted or somehow proved!"

Kate looked for her moment at a loss. "To convince 'me'?"

"I wouldn't have made my denial, in such conditions, only to take it back afterwards."

With this quickly light came for her, and with it also her colour flamed. "Oh, you would have broken with me to make your denial a truth? You would have 'chucked' me"—she embraced it perfectly—"to save your conscience?"

"I couldn't have done anything else," said Merton Densher. "So you see how right I was not to commit myself, and how little I could dream of it. If it ever again appears to you that I might have done so, remember what I say."

Kate again considered, but not with the effect at once to which he pointed. "You have fallen in love with her."

"Well then, say so—with a dying woman. Why need you mind, and what does it matter?"

It came from him, the question, straight out of the intensity of relation and the face-to-face necessity into which, from the first, from his entering the room, they had found themselves thrown; but it 353