"Which of them are you talking of?"

Milly wondered an instant--then had a light. "I'm not talking of Mr.

Densher." With which moreover she showed amus.e.m.e.nt. "Though if you can be comfortable about Mr. Densher too so much the better."

"Oh you meant Sir Luke Strett? Certainly he's a fine type. Do you know," Susie continued, "whom he reminds me of? Of _our_ great man--Dr.

b.u.t.trick of Boston."

Milly recognised Dr. b.u.t.trick of Boston, but she dropped him after a tributary pause. "What do you think, now that you've seen him, of Mr.

Densher?"

It was not till after consideration, with her eyes fixed on her friend's, that Susie produced her answer. "I think he's very handsome."

Milly remained smiling at her, though putting on a little the manner of a teacher with a pupil. "Well, that will do for the first time. I _have_ done," she went on, "what I wanted."

"Then that's all _we_ want. You see there are plenty of things."

Milly shook her head for the "plenty." "The best is not to know--that includes them all. I don't--I don't know. Nothing about anything--except that you're _with_ me. Remember that, please. There won't be anything that, on my side, for you, I shall forget. So it's all right."

The effect of it by this time was fairly, as intended, to sustain Susie, who dropped in spite of herself into the rea.s.suring. "Most certainly it's all right. I think you ought to understand that he sees no reason--"

"Why I shouldn't have a grand long life?" Milly had taken it straight up, as to understand it and for a moment consider it. But she disposed of it otherwise. "Oh of course I know _that_." She spoke as if her friend's point were small.

Mrs. Stringham tried to enlarge it. "Well, what I mean is that he didn't say to me anything that he hasn't said to yourself."

"Really?--I would in his place!" She might have been disappointed, but she had her good humour. "He tells me to _live_"--and she oddly limited the word.

It left Susie a little at sea. "Then what do you want more?"

"My dear," the girl presently said, "I don't 'want,' as I a.s.sure you, anything. Still," she added, "I _am_ living. Oh yes, I'm living."

It put them again face to face, but it had wound Mrs. Stringham up. "So am I then, you'll see!"--she spoke with the note of her recovery. Yet it was her wisdom now--meaning by it as much as she did--not to say more than that. She had risen by Milly's aid to a certain command of what was before them; the ten minutes of their talk had in fact made her more distinctly aware of the presence in her mind of a new idea. It was really perhaps an old idea with a new value; it had at all events begun during the last hour, though at first but feebly, to shine with a special light. That was because in the morning darkness had so suddenly descended--a sufficient shade of night to bring out the power of a star. The dusk might be thick yet, but the sky had comparatively cleared; and Susan Shepherd's star from this time on continued to twinkle for her. It was for the moment, after her pa.s.sage with Milly, the one spark left in the heavens. She recognised, as she continued to watch it, that it had really been set there by Sir Luke Strett's visit and that the impressions immediately following had done no more than fix it. Milly's reappearance with Mr. Densher at her heels--or, so oddly perhaps, at Miss Croy's heels, Miss Croy being at Milly's--had contributed to this effect, though it was only with the lapse of the greater obscurity that Susie made that out. The obscurity had reigned during the hour of their friends' visit, faintly clearing indeed while, in one of the rooms, Kate Croy's remarkable advance to her intensified the fact that Milly and the young man were conjoined in the other. If it hadn't acquired on the spot all the intensity of which it was capable, this was because the poor lady still sat in her primary gloom, the gloom the great benignant doctor had practically left behind him.

The intensity the circ.u.mstance in question _might_ wear to the informed imagination would have been sufficiently revealed for us, no doubt--and with other things to our purpose--in two or three of those confidential pa.s.sages with Mrs. Lowder that she now permitted herself. She hadn't yet been so glad that she believed in her old friend; for if she hadn't had, at such a pa.s.s, somebody or other to believe in she should certainly have stumbled by the way. Discretion had ceased to consist of silence; silence was gross and thick, whereas wisdom should taper, however tremulously, to a point. She betook herself to Lancaster Gate the morning after the colloquy just noted; and there, in Maud Manningham's own sanctum, she gradually found relief in giving an account of herself. An account of herself was one of the things that she had long been in the habit of expecting herself regularly to give--the regularity depending of course much on such tests of merit as might, by laws beyond her control, rise in her path. She never spared herself in short a proper sharpness of conception of how she had behaved, and it was a statement that she for the most part found herself able to make. What had happened at present was that nothing, as she felt, was left of her to report to; she was all too sunk in the inevitable and the abysmal. To give an account of herself she must give it to somebody else, and her first instalment of it to her hostess was that she must please let her cry. She couldn't cry, with Milly in observation, at the hotel, which she had accordingly left for that purpose; and the power happily came to her with the good opportunity.

She cried and cried at first--she confined herself to that; it was for the time the best statement of her business. Mrs. Lowder moreover intelligently took it as such, though knocking off a note or two more, as she said, while Susie sat near her table. She could resist the contagion of tears, but her patience did justice to her visitor's most vivid plea for it. "I shall never be able, you know, to cry again--at least not ever with _her;_ so I must take it out when I can. Even if she does herself it won't be for me to give away; for what would that be but a confession of despair? I'm not with her for that--I'm with her to be regularly sublime. Besides, Milly won't cry herself."

"I'm sure I hope," said Mrs. Lowder, "that she won't have occasion to."

"She won't even if she does have occasion. She won't shed a tear.

There's something that will prevent her."

"Oh!" said Mrs. Lowder.

"Yes, her pride," Mrs. Stringham explained in spite of her friend's doubt, and it was with this that her communication took consistent form. It had never been pride, Maud Manningham had hinted, that kept _her_ from crying when other things made for it; it had only been that these same things, at such times, made still more for business, arrangements, correspondence, the ringing of bells, the marshalling of servants, the taking of decisions. "I might be crying now," she said, "if I weren't writing letters"--and this quite without harshness for her anxious companion, to whom she allowed just the administrative margin for difference. She had interrupted her no more than she would have interrupted the piano-tuner. It gave poor Susie time; and when Mrs. Lowder, to save appearances and catch the post, had, with her addressed and stamped notes, met at the door of the room the footman summoned by the pressure of a k.n.o.b, the facts of the case were sufficiently ready for her. It took but two or three, however, given their importance, to lay the ground for the great one--Mrs. Stringham's interview of the day before with Sir Luke, who had wished to see her about Milly.

"He had wished it himself?"

"I think he was glad of it. Clearly indeed he was. He stayed a quarter of an hour. I could see that for _him_ it was long. He's interested,"

said Mrs. Stringham.

"Do you mean in her case?"

"He says it _isn't_ a case."

"What then is it?"

"It isn't, at least," Mrs. Stringham explained, "the case she believed it to be--thought it at any rate _might_ be--when, without my knowledge, she went to see him. She went because there was something she was afraid of, and he examined her thoroughly--he has made sure.

She's wrong--she hasn't what she thought."

"And what did she think?" Mrs. Lowder demanded.

"He didn't tell me."

"And you didn't ask?"

"I asked nothing," said poor Susie--"I only took what he gave me. He gave me no more than he had to--he was beautiful," she went on. "He _is_, thank G.o.d, interested."

"He must have been interested in _you_, dear," Maud Manningham observed with kindness.

Her visitor met it with candour. "Yes, love, I think he _is_. I mean that he sees what he can do with me."

Mrs. Lowder took it rightly. "For _her_."

"For her. Anything in the world he will or he must. He can use me to the last bone, and he likes at least that. He says the great thing for her is to be happy."

"It's surely the great thing for every one. Why, therefore," Mrs.

Lowder handsomely asked, "should we cry so hard about it?"

"Only," poor Susie wailed, "that it's so strange, so beyond us. I mean if she can't be."

"She must be." Mrs. Lowder knew no impossibles. "She _shall_ be."

"Well--if you'll help. He thinks, you know, we _can_ help."

Mrs. Lowder faced a moment, in her ma.s.sive way, what Sir Luke Strett thought. She sat back there, her knees apart, not unlike a picturesque ear-ringed matron at a market-stall; while her friend, before her, dropped their items, tossed the separate truths of the matter one by one, into her capacious ap.r.o.n. "But is that all he came to you for--to tell you she must be happy?"

"That she must be _made_ so--that's the point. It seemed enough, as he told me," Mrs. Stringham went on; "he makes it somehow such a grand possible affair."

"Ah well, if he makes it possible!"

"I mean especially he makes it grand. He gave it to me, that is, as _my_ part. The rest's his own."

"And what's the rest?" Mrs. Lowder asked.

"I don't know. _His_ business. He means to keep hold of her."

"Then why do you say it isn't a 'case'? It must be very much of one."

Everything in Mrs. Stringham confessed to the extent of it. "It's only that it isn't _the_ case she herself supposed."