"Oh yes, I've touched it. I feel as if, ever since, I'd been touching nothing else. I quite firmly," he pursued as if to be plainer, "took hold of it."
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 offer again her expectant face, while his own, to her impatience, seemed perversely to fill with another thought. "But now that you've done so you feel you don't want to."
"I want to immensely," he said. "Only 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?"
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."
"The first time after my return--the Sunday I came to you. What's he doing," Densher went on, "at that hour of the morning with her? What does his having been with her there mean?"
"Of that man--Lord Mark of course. What does it represent?"
"Yes, my dear--and with you. It comes more or less to the same thing; and it's what you didn't tell me the other day when I put you the question."
Kate tried to remember the other day. "You asked me nothing about any hour."
"I asked you when it was you last saw him--previous, I mean, to his second descent at Venice. You wouldn't say, and as we were talking of a matter comparatively more important I let it pass. But the fact remains, you know, my dear, that you haven't told me."
Two things in this speech appeared to have reached Kate more distinctly than the others. "I 'wouldn't say'?--and you 'let it pass'?" She looked just coldly blank. "You really speak as if I were keeping something back."
"Well, you see," Densher persisted, "you're not even telling me now. All I want to know," he nevertheless explained, "is whether there was a connexion between that proceeding on his part, which was practically--oh beyond all doubt!--the shock precipitating for her what has now happened, and anything that had occurred with him previously for yourself. How in the world did he know we're engaged?"