He waited at the window another moment and then faced his friend with a thought. "He will have proposed to Miss Croy. That's what has happened."
Her reserve continued. "It's you who must judge."
"Well, I do judge. Mrs. Lowder will have done so too—only she, poor lady, wrong. Miss Croy's refusal of him will have struck him"—Densher continued to make it out—"as a phenomenon requiring a reason."
"And you've been clear to him as the reason?"
"Not too clear—since I'm sticking here and since that has been a fact to make his descent on Miss Theale relevant. But clear enough. He has believed," said Densher bravely, "that I may have been a reason at Lancaster Gate, and yet at the same time have been up to something in Venice."
Mrs. Stringham took her courage from his own. "'Up to' something? Up to what?"
"God knows. To some 'game,' as they say. To some deviltry. To some duplicity."
"Which of course," Mrs. Stringham observed, "is a monstrous supposition." Her companion, after a stiff minute—sensibly long for each—fell away from her again, and then added to it another minute, which he spent once more looking out with his hands in his pockets. This was no answer, he perfectly knew, to what she had dropped, and it even seemed to state for his own ears that no answer was possible. She left him to himself, and he was glad she had declined, for their further colloquy, the advantage of lights. These would have been an advantage mainly to herself. Yet she got her benefit too even from the absence of them. It came out in her very tone when at last she addressed him—so differently, for confidence—in words she had already used. "If Sir Luke himself asks it of you as something you can do for him, will you deny to Milly herself what she has been made so dreadfully to believe?"
Oh how he knew he hung back! But at last he said: "You're absolutely certain then that she does believe it?"
"Certain?" She appealed to their whole situation. "Judge!"