tled
something for him that he had come to her pleadingly and holding out
his hands, which she immediately seized with her own as if both to
check him and to keep him. It was by keeping him thus for a minute that
she did check him; she held him long enough, while, with their eyes
deeply meeting, they waited in silence for him to recover himself and
renew his discretion. He coloured as with a return of the sense of
where they were, and that gave her precisely one of her usual
victories, which immediately took further form. By the time he had
dropped her hands he had again taken hold, as it were, of Milly's. It
was not at any rate with Milly he had broken. "I'll do all you wish,"
he declared as if to acknowledge the acceptance of his condition that
he had practically, after all, drawn from her--a declaration on which
she then, recurring to her first idea, promptly acted.

"If you _are_ as good as that I go. You'll tell her that, finding you
with her, I wouldn't wait. Say that, you know, from yourself. She'll
understand."

She had reached the door with it--she was full of decision; but he had
before she left him one more doubt. "I don't see how she can understand
enough, you know, without understanding too much."

"You don't need to see."

He required then a last injunction. "I must simply go it blind?"

"You must simply be kind to her."

"And leave the rest to you?"

"Leave the rest to _her_," said Kate disappearing.

It came back then afresh to that, as it had come before. Milly, three
minutes after Kate had gone, returned in her array--her big black hat,
so little superstitiously in the fashion, her fine black garments
throughout, the swathing of her throat, which Densher vaguely took for
an infinite number of yards of priceless lace, and which, its folded
fabric kept in place by heavy rows of pearls, hung down to her feet
like the stole of a priestess. He spoke to her at once of their
friend's visit and flight. "She hadn't known she'd find me," he
said--and said at present without difficulty. He had so rounded his
corner that it wasn't a question of a word more or less.

She took this account of the matter as quite sufficient; she glossed
over whatever might be awkward. "I'm sorry--but I of course often see
_her_." He felt the discrimination in his favour and how it justified
Kate. This was Milly's tone when the matter was left to her. Well, it
should now be wholly left.

BOOK SEVENTH

I

When Ka