Page:The Wings of the Dove (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1902), Volume 2.djvu/412

 And kindly consider too that I, after all, if you're in trouble, can a little wish to help you. Perhaps I can absolutely even do it."

"My dear child, it's just because of the sense of your wish! I suppose I am in trouble—I suppose that's it." He said this with so odd a suddenness of simplicity that she could only stare for it—which he as promptly saw. So he turned off as he could his vagueness. "And yet I oughtn't to be." Which sounded indeed vaguer still.

She waited a moment. "Is it, as you say for my own business, anything very awful?"

"Well," he slowly replied, "you'll tell me if you find it so. I mean if you find my idea"

He was so slow that she took him up. "Awful?" A sound of impatience—the form of a laugh—at last escaped her. "I can't find it anything at all till I know what you're talking about."

It brought him then more to the point, though it did so at first but by making him, on the hearthrug before her, with his hands in his pockets, turn awhile to and fro. There rose in him even with this movement a recall of another time—the hour, in Venice, the hour of gloom and storm, when Susan Shepherd had sat in his quarters there very much as Kate was sitting now, and he had wondered, in pain even as now, what he might say and might not. Yet the present occasion, after all, was somehow the easier. He tried at any rate to attach that feeling to it while he stopped before his companion. "The 402