tever remains of the
ideal straightness in him were still able to pull themselves together
and operate. He was afterwards to say to himself that something had at
that moment hung for him by a hair. "Oh I know what one would do for
Kate!"--it had hung for him by a hair to break out with that, which he
felt he had really been kept from by an element in his consciousness
stronger still. The proof of the truth in question was precisely in his
silence; resisting the impulse to break out was what he was doing for
Kate. This at the time moreover came and went quickly enough; he was
trying the next minute but to make Milly's allusion easy for herself.
"Of course I know what friends you are--and of course I understand," he
permitted himself to add, "any amount of devotion to a person so
charming. That's the good turn then she'll do us all--I mean her
working for your return."

"Oh you don't know," said Milly, "how much I'm really on her hands."

He could but accept the appearance of wondering how much he might show
he knew. "Ah she's very masterful."

"She's great. Yet I don't say she bullies me."

"No--that's not the way. At any rate it isn't hers," he smiled. He
remembered, however, then that an undue acquaintance with Kate's ways
was just what he mustn't show; and he pursued the subject no further
than to remark with a good intention that had the further merit of
representing a truth: "I don't feel as if I knew her--really to call
know."

"Well, if you come to that, I don't either!" she laughed. The words
gave him, as soon as they were uttered, a sense of responsibility for
his own; though during a silence that ensued for a minute he had time
to recognise that his own contained after all no element of falsity.
Strange enough therefore was it that he could go too far--if it _was_
too far--without being false. His observation was one he would
perfectly have made to Kate herself. And before he again spoke, and
before Milly did, he took time for more still--for feeling how just
here it was that he must break short off if his mind was really made up
not to go further. It was as if he had been at a corner--and fairly put
there by his last speech; so that it depended on him whether or no to
turn it. The silence, if prolonged but an instant, might even have
given him a sense of her waiting to see what he would do. It was filled
for them the next thing by the sound, rather voluminous for the August
afternoon, of the approach, in