Page:The Wings of the Dove (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1902), Volume 2.djvu/384

 which indeed he was graver as he lingered and looked out.

Kate came at last by the way he had thought least likely—came as if she had started from the Marble Arch; but her advent was response—that was the great matter; response marked in her face and agreeable to him, even after Aunt Maud's responses, as nothing had been since his return to London. She had not, it was true, answered his wire, and he had begun to fear, as she was late, that with the instinct of what he might be again intending to press upon her, she had decided—though not with ease—to deprive him of his chance. He would have of course, she knew, other chances, but she perhaps saw this one as offering her special danger. That, in fact, Densher could himself feel, was exactly why he had so prepared it, and he had rejoiced, even while he waited, in all that the conditions had to say to him of their simpler and better time. The shortest day of the year though it might be, it was, in the same place, by a whim of the weather, almost as much to their purpose as the days of sunny afternoons when they had taken their first trysts. This and that tree, within sight, on the grass, stretched bare boughs over the couple of chairs in which they had sat of old and in which—for they really could sit down again—they might recover the clearness of their beginnings. It was to all intents, however, this very reference that showed itself in Kate's face as, with her quick walk, she came toward him. It 374