"For real news," Kate herself after an instant added.
"She hasn't thought Mrs. Stringham's real?"
"It's perhaps only I who haven't. It was on Aunt Maud's trying again three days ago to see him that she heard at his house of his having gone. He had started I believe some days before."
"And won't then by this time be back?"
Kate shook her head. "She sent yesterday to know."
"He won't leave her then"—Densher had turned it over—"while she lives. He'll stay to the end. He's magnificent."
"I think she is," said Kate.
It had made them again look at each other long; and what it drew from him rather oddly was: "Oh you don't know!"
"Well, she's after all my friend."
It was somehow, with her handsome demur, the answer he had least expected of her; and it fanned with its breath, for a brief instant, his old sense of her variety. "I see. You would have been sure of it. You were sure of it."