"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."