"She never wanted the truth"--Kate had a high headshake. "She wanted _you_. She would have taken from you what you could give her and been glad of it, even if she had known it false. You might have lied to her from pity, and she have seen you and felt you lie, and yet--since it was all for tenderness--she would have thanked you and blessed you and clung to you but the more. For that was your strength, my dear man--that she loves you with passion."
"Oh my 'strength'!" Densher coldly murmured.
"Otherwise, since she had sent for you, what was it to ask of you?" And then--quite without irony--as he waited a moment to say: "Was it just once more to look at you?"
"She had nothing to ask of me--nothing, that is, but not to stay any longer. She did to that extent want to see me. She had supposed at first--after he had been with her--that I had seen the propriety of taking myself off. Then since I hadn't--seeing my propriety as I did in another way--she found, days later, that I was still there. This," said Densher, "affected her."
Again she struck him, for all her dignity, as glib. "If it was somehow for _her_ I was still staying, she wished that to end, she wished me to know how little there was need of it. And as a manner of farewell she wished herself to tell me so."
"Face-to-face, yes. Personally, as she desired."
"No, Kate," he returned with all their mutual consideration; "not as I did. I hadn't desired it in the least."
"To oblige her. And of course also to oblige you."
"'Glad'?"--he echoed vaguely the way it rang out.
"I mean you did quite the right thing. You did it especially in having stayed. But that was all?" Kate went on. "That you mustn't wait?"
"That was really all--and in perfect kindness."
"Ah kindness naturally: from the moment she asked of you such a--well, such an effort. That you mustn't wait--that was the point," Kate added--"to see her die."
"That was the point, my dear," Densher said.
He thought a little. "I didn't time it to a second. I paid her the visit--just like another."
"Oh!" said Kate. Which had apparently the effect of slightly arresting his speech--an arrest she took advantage of to continue; making with it indeed her nearest approach to an enquiry of the kind against which he had braced himself. "Did she receive you--in her condition--in her room?"