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By Root 16501 0

’t lose a benefit by not submitting if they could be made to submit. To Milly, as so much younger, such far views couldn’t be imputed: there was nobody she was supposable as interested for. It was too soon, since she wasn’t interested for herself. Even the richest woman, at her age, lacked motive, and Milly’s motive doubtless had plenty of time to arrive. She was meanwhile beautiful, simple, sublime without it—whether missing it and vaguely reaching out for it or not; and with it, for that matter, in the event, would really be these things just as much. Only then she might very well have, like Aunt Maud, a manner. Such were the connexions, at all events, in which the colloquy of our two ladies freshly flickered up—in which it came round that the elder asked the younger if she had herself, in the afternoon, named Mr. Densher as an acquaintance.

“Oh no—I said nothing of having seen him. I remembered,” the girl explained, “Mrs. Lowder’s wish.”

“But that,” her friend observed after a moment, “was for silence to Kate.”

“Yes—but Mrs. Condrip would immediately have told Kate.”

“Why soP—since she must dislike to talk about him.”

“Mrs. Condrip must?” Milly thought. “What she would like most is that her sister should be brought to think ill of him; and if anything she can tell her will help that—” But the girl dropped suddenly here, as if her companion would see.

Her companion’s interest, however, was all for what she herself saw. “You mean she’ll immediately speak?” Mrs. Stringham gathered that this was what Milly meant, but it left still a question. “How will it be against him that you know him?”

“Oh how can I say? It won’t be so much one’s knowing him as one’s having kept it out of sight.”

“Ah,” said Mrs. Stringham as for comfort, “you haven’t kept it out of sight. Isn’t it much rather Miss Croy herself who has?”

“It isn’t my acquaintance with him,” Milly smiled, “that she has dissimulated.”

“She has dissimulated only her own? Well then the responsibility’s hers.”

“Ah but,” said the girl, not perhaps with marked consequence, “she has a right to do as she likes.”

“Then so, my dear, have you!” smiled Susan Shepherd.

Milly looked at her as if she were almost venerably simple, but also as if this were what one loved her for. “We’re not quarrelling about it, Kate and I, yet.”

“I only meant,” Mrs. Stringham explained, “that I don’t see what Mrs. Condrip would gain.”

“By her being able to tell Kate?” Milly thought. “I only meant that I don’t see what I myself should gain.”

“But it will have to come out—that he knows you both—some time.”

Milly scarce assented. “Do you mean when he comes back?”

“He’ll find you both here, and he can hardly be looked to, I take it, to ‘cut’ either of you for the sake of the other.”

This placed the question at last on a basis more distinctly cheerful. “I might get at him somehow beforehand,” the girl suggested; “I might give him what they call here the ‘tip’—that he’s not to know me when we meet. Or, better still, I mightn’t be here at all.”

“Do you want to run away from him?”

It was, oddly enough, an idea Milly seemed half to accept. “I don’t know what I want to run away from!”

It dispelled, on the spot—something, to the elder woman’s ear, in the sad, sweet sound of it—any ghost of any need of explaining. The sense was constant for her that their relation might have been afloat, like some island of the south, in a great warm sea that represented, for every conceivable chance, a margin, an outer sphere, of general emotion; and the effect of the occurrence of anything in particular was to make the sea submerge the island, the margin flood the text. The great wave now for a moment swept over. “I’ll go anywhere else in the world you like.”

But Milly came up through it. “Dear old Susie—how I do work you!”

“Oh this is nothing yet.”

“No indeed -to what it will be.”

“You’re not—and it’s vain to pretend,” said dear old Susie, who had been taking her in, “as sound and strong as I insist on having you.”

“Insist, insist—the more the better. But the day I look as sound and strong as that, you know,