Page:The Wings of the Dove (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1902), Volume 2.djvu/416

 "Then where is it?"

"Oh, I have it here."

"And you've brought it to show me?"

"I've brought it to show you."

So he said with a distinctness that had, among his other oddities, almost a sound of cheer, yet making no movement that matched his words. She could accordingly but show again her expectant face, while his own, to her impatience, seemed to fill, perversely, with still another thought. "But now that you've done so you feel you don't want to."

"I want to immensely," he said, "but you tell me nothing."

She smiled at him, with this, finally, as if he were an unreasonable child. "It seems to me I tell you quite as much as you tell me. You haven't yet even told me how it is that such explanations as you require don't come from your document itself." Then, as he answered nothing, she had a flash. "You mean you haven't read it?"

"I haven't read it."

She stared. "Then how am I to help you with it?"

Again leaving her while she never budged he paced five strides and again he was before her. "By telling me this. It's something, you know, that you wouldn't tell me the other day."

She was vague. "The other day?"

"The first time after my return—the Sunday I came to you. What is he doing," Densher went on, 406