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By Root 3589 0

anything at all it would be rather remarkable of him. As for what there was to guess, he couldn’t—if this was present to him—have arrived at it save by his own acuteness. That acuteness was therefore immense; and if it supplied the subtlety she thought of leaving him to, his portion would be none so bad. Neither, for that matter, would hers be—which she was even actually enjoying. She wondered if really then there mightn’t be something for her. She hadn’t been sure in coming to him that she was “better,” and he hadn’t used, he would be awfully careful not to use, that compromising term about her; in spite of all of which she would have been ready to say, for the amiable sympathy of it, “Yes, I must be,” for he had this unaided sense of something that had happened to her. It was a sense unaided, because who could have told him of anything? Susie, she was certain, hadn’t yet seen him again, and there were things it was impossible she could have told him the first time. Since such was his penetration, therefore, why shouldn’t she gracefully, in recognition of it, accept the new circumstance, the one he was clearly wanting to congratulate her on, as a sufficient cause? If one nursed a cause tenderly enough it might produce an effect; and this, to begin with, would be a way of nursing. “You gave me the other day,” she went on, “plenty to think over, and I’ve been doing that—thinking it over—quite as you’ll have probably wished me. I think I must be pretty easy to treat,” she smiled, “since you’ve already done me so much good.”

The only obstacle to reciprocity with him was that he looked in advance so closely related to all one’s possibilities that one missed the pleasure of really improving it. “Oh no, you’re extremely difficult to treat. I’ve need with you, I assure you, of all my wit.”

“Well, I mean I do come up.” She hadn’t meanwhile a bit believed in his answer, convinced as she was that if she had been difficult it would be the last thing he would have told her. “I’m doing,” she said, “as I like.”

“Then it’s as I like. But you must really, though we’re having such a decent month, get straight away.” In pursuance of which, when she had replied with promptitude that her departure—for the Tyrol and then for Venice—was quite fixed for the fourteenth, he took her up with alacrity. “For Venice? That’s perfect, for we shall meet there. I’ve a dream of it for October, when I’m hoping for three weeks off; three weeks during which, if I can get them clear, my niece, a young person who has quite the whip hand of me, is to take me where she prefers. I heard from her only yesterday that she expects to prefer Venice.”

“That’s lovely then. I shall expect you there. And anything that, in advance or in any way, I can do for you—!”

“Oh thank you. My niece, I seem to feel, does for me. But it will be capital to find you there.”

“I think it ought to make you feel,” she said after a moment, “that I am easy to treat.”

But he shook his head again; he wouldn’t have it. “You’ve not come to that yet.”

“One has to be so bad for it?”

“Well, I don’t think I’ve ever come to it—to ‘ease’ of treatment. I doubt if it’s possible. I’ve not, if it is, found any one bad enough. The ease, you see, is for you.”

“I see—I see. ”

They had an odd friendly, but perhaps the least bit awkward pause on it; after which Sir Luke asked: “And that clever lady—she goes with you?”

“Mrs. Stringham? Oh dear, yes. She’ll stay with me, I hope, to the end.”

He had a cheerful blankness. “To the end of what?”

“Well—of everything.”

“Ah then,” he laughed, “you’re in luck. The end of everything is far off. This, you know, I’m hoping,” said Sir Luke, “is only the beginning.” And the next question he risked might have been a part of his hope. “Just you and she together?”

“No, two other friends; two ladies of whom we’ve seen more here than of any one and who are just the right people for us.”

He thought a moment. “You’ll be four women together then?”

“Ah,” said Milly, “we’re widows and orphans. But I think,” she added as if to say what she saw would reassure him, “that