t, and though in respect to such remarks
everything was in the tone, the tone was by midnight there too. She had
had originally her full apprehension of his coerced, certainly of his
vague, condition--full apprehensions often being with her immediate;
then she had had her equal consciousness that, within five minutes,
something between them had--well, she couldn't call it anything but
_come._ It was nothing, but it was somehow everything--it was that
something for each of them had happened.

They had found themselves looking at each other straight, and for a
longer time on end than was usual even at parties in galleries; but
that, after all, would have been a small affair, if there hadn't been
something else with it. It wasn't, in a word, simply that their eyes
had met; other conscious organs, faculties, feelers had met as well,
and when Kate afterwards imaged to herself the sharp, deep fact she saw
it, in the oddest way, as a particular performance. She had observed a
ladder against a garden wall, and had trusted herself so to climb it as
to be able to see over into the probable garden on the other side. On
reaching the top she had found herself face to face with a gentleman
engaged in a like calculation at the same moment, and the two inquirers
had remained confronted on their ladders. The great point was that for
the rest of that evening they had been perched--they had not climbed
down; and indeed, during the time that followed, Kate at least had had
the perched feeling--it was as if she were there aloft without a
retreat. A simpler expression of all this is doubtless but that they
had taken each other in with interest; and without a happy hazard six
months later the incident would have closed in that account of it. The
accident, meanwhile, had been as natural as anything in London ever is:
Kate had one afternoon found herself opposite Mr. Densher on the
Underground Railway. She had entered the train at Sloane Square to go
to Queen's Road, and the carriage in which she had found a place was
all but full. Densher was already in it--on the other bench and at the
furthest angle; she was sure of him before they had again started. The
day and the hour were darkness, there were six other persons, and she
had been busy placing herself; but her consciousness had gone to him as
straight as if they had come together in some bright level of the
desert. They had on neither part a second's hesitation; they looked
across the choke