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By Root 3493 0

had lost, on the way upstairs, the look—the look—that made her young hostess so subtly think and one of the signs of which was that she never kept it for many moments at once; yet she stood there, none the less, so in her bloom and in her strength, so completely again the “handsome girl” beyond all others, the “handsome girl” for whom Milly had at first gratefully taken her, that to meet her now with the note of the plaintive would amount somehow to a surrender, to a confession. She would never in her life be ill; the greatest doctor would keep her, at the worst, the fewest minutes; and it was as if she had asked just with all this practical impeccability for all that was most mortal in her friend. These things, for Milly, inwardly danced their dance; but the vibration produced and the dust kicked up had lasted less than our account of them. Almost before she knew it she was answering, and answering beautifully, with no consciousness of fraud, only as with a sudden flare of the famous “will-power” she had heard about, read about, and which was what her medical adviser had mainly thrown her back on. “Oh it’s all right. He’s lovely.”

Kate was splendid, and it would have been clear for Milly now, had the further presumption been needed, that she had said no word to Mrs. Stringham. “You mean you’ve been absurd?”

“Absurd.” It was a simple word to say, but the consequence of it, for our young woman, was that she felt it, as soon as spoken, to have done something for her safety.

And Kate really hung on her lips. “There’s nothing at all the matter?”

“Nothing to worry about. I shall need a little watching, but I shan’t have to do anything dreadful, or even in the least inconvenient. I can do in fact as I like.” It was wonderful for Milly how just to put it so made all its pieces fall at present quite properly into their places.

Yet even before the full effect came Kate had seized, kissed, blessed her. “My love, you’re too sweet! It’s too dear! But it’s as I was sure.” Then she grasped the full beauty. “You can do as you like?”

“Quite. Isn’t it charming?”

“Ah but catch you,” Kate triumphed with gaiety, “not doing—And what shall you do?”

“For the moment simply enjoy it. Enjoy”—Milly was completely luminous—“having got out of my scrape.”

“Learning, you mean, so easily, that you are well?”

It was as if Kate had but too conveniently put the words into her mouth. “Learning, I mean, so easily, that I am well.”

“Only no one’s of course well enough to stay in London now. He can’t,” Kate went on, “want this of you.”

“Mercy no—I’m to knock about. I’m to go to places.”

“But not beastly ‘climates’—Engadines, Rivieras, boredoms?”

“No; just, as I say, where I prefer. I’m to go in for pleasure.”

“Oh the duck!”—Kate, with her own shades of familiarity, abounded. “But what kind of pleasure?”

“The highest,” Milly smiled.

Her friend met it as nobly. “Which is the highest?”

“Well, it’s just our chance to find out. You must help me.”

“What have I wanted to do but help you,” Kate asked, “from the moment I first laid eyes on you?” Yet with this too Kate had her wonder. “I like your talking, though, about that. What help, with your luck all round, do you need?”

—V—

Milly indeed at last couldn’t say; so that she had really for the time brought it along to the point so oddly marked for her by her visitor’s arrival, the truth that she was enviably strong. She carried this out, from that evening, for each hour still left her, and the more easily perhaps that the hours were now narrowly numbered. All she actually waited for was Sir Luke Strett’s promised visit; as to her proceeding on which, however, her mind was quite made up. Since he wanted to get at Susie he should have the freest access, and then perhaps he would see how he liked it. What was between them they might settle as between them, and any pressure it should lift from her own spirit they were at liberty to convert to their use. If the dear man wished to fire Susan Shepherd with a still higher ideal, he would only after all, at the worst, have Susan on his hands. If devotion,