Chapter 26

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 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's 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 you're afraid--it's wonderful!--to be in love with her."

"I never was in love with her," said Densher.

She took it, but after a little she met it. "I believe that now--for the time she lived. I believe it at least for the time you were there. But your change came--as it might well--the day you last saw her; she died for you then that you might understand her. From that hour you _did_." With which Kate slowly rose. "And I do now. She did it _for_ us." Densher rose to face her, and she went on with her thought. "I used to call her, in my stupidity--for want of anything better--a dove. Well she stretched out her wings, and it was to _that_ they reached. They cover us."

"They cover us," Densher said.

"That's what I give you," Kate gravely wound up. "That's what I've done for you."

His look at her had a slow strangeness that had dried, on the moment, his tears. "Do I understand then--?"

"That I do consent?" She gravely shook her head. "No--for I see. You'll marry me without the money; you won't marry me with it. If I don't consent _you_ don't."

"You lose me?" He showed, though naming it frankly, a sort of awe of her high grasp. "Well, you lose nothing else. I make over to you every penny."

Prompt was his own clearness, but she had no smile this time to spare. "Precisely--so that I must choose."

"You must choose."

Strange it was for him then that she stood in his own rooms doing it, while, with an intensity now beyond any that had ever made his breath come slow, he waited for her act. "There's but one thing that can save you from my choice."

"From your choice of my surrender to you?"

"Yes"--and she gave a nod at the long envelope on the table--"your surrender of that."

"What is it then?"

"Your word of honour that you're not in love with her memory."

"Oh--her memory!"

"Ah"--she made a high gesture--"don't speak of it as if you couldn't be. I could in your place; and you're one for whom it will do. Her memory's your love. You _want_ no other."

He heard her out in stillness, watching her face but not moving. Then he only said: "I'll marry you, mind you, in an hour."

"As we were?"

"As we were."

But she turned to the door, and her headshake was now the end. "We shall never be again as we were!"

THE END

The Riverside Press

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End of Project Gutenberg's The Wings of the Dove, Volume II, by Henry James