t he could decently do, given their happy
acquaintance, was to call with an enquiry after learning that she had
been prevented by illness from meeting him at dinner. And then there
was the beautiful accident of her other demonstration; he must at any
rate have given a sign as a sequel to the hospitality he had shared
with Kate. Well, he was giving one now--such as it was; he was finding
her, to begin with, accessible, and very naturally and prettily glad to
see him. He had come, after luncheon, early, though not so early but
that she might already be out if she were well enough; and she was well
enough and yet was still at home. He had an inner glimpse, with this,
of the comment Kate would have made on it; it wasn't absent from his
thought that Milly would have been at home by _her_ account because
expecting, after a talk with Mrs. Stringham, that a certain person
might turn up. He even--so pleasantly did things go--enjoyed freedom of
mind to welcome, on that supposition, a fresh sign of the beautiful
hypocrisy of women. He went so far as to enjoy believing the girl
_might_ have stayed in for him; it helped him to enjoy her behaving as
if she hadn't. She expressed, that is, exactly the right degree of
surprise; she didn't a bit overdo it: the lesson of which was,
perceptibly, that, so far as his late lights had opened the door to any
want of the natural in their meetings, he might trust her to take care
of it for him as well as for herself. She had begun this, admirably, on
his entrance, with her turning away from the table at which she had
apparently been engaged in letter-writing; it was the very possibility
of his betraying a concern for her as one of the afflicted that she had
within the first minute conjured away. She was never, never--did he
understand?--to be one of the afflicted for him; and the manner in
which he understood it, something of the answering pleasure that he
couldn't help knowing he showed, constituted, he was very soon after to
acknowledge, something like a start for intimacy. When things like that
could pass people had in truth to be equally conscious of a relation.
It soon made one, at all events, when it didn't find one made. She had
let him ask--there had been time for that, his allusion to her friend's
explanatory arrival at Lancaster Gate without her being inevitable; but
she had blown away, and quite as much with the look in her eyes as with
the smile on her lips, every ground for anxiety and