Page:The Wings of the Dove (New York, Charles Scribners Sons, 1902), Volume 2.djvu/447

 "'Published'?"—he winced.

"I mean won't you see them in the papers?"

"Ah, never! I shall know how to escape that."

It seemed to settle the subject, but she had, the next minute, another insistence. "Your desire is to escape everything?"

"Everything."

"And do you need no more definite sense of what it is that you ask me to help you to renounce?"

"My sense is sufficient without being definite . I'm willing to believe that the amount of money is not small."

"Ah, there you are!" she exclaimed.

"If she was to leave me a remembrance," he quietly pursued, "it would inevitably not be meagre."

Kate waited as for how to say it. "It's worthy of her. It's what she was herself—if you remember what we once said that was."

He hesitated, as if there had been many things. But he remembered one of them. "Stupendous?"

"Stupendous." A faint smile for it—ever so small—had flickered in her face, but had vanished before the omen of tears, a little less uncertain, had shown themselves in his own. His eyes filled—but that made her continue. She continued gently. "I think that what it really is must be that you're afraid. I mean," she explained, "that you're afraid of all the truth. If you're in love with her without it, what indeed can you be more. And 437