lady had no sooner said, however,
than she almost tragically gasped at herself. She glared at Milly with
a pretended pluck. "What I mean is that she saw one had been taken up
with something. When I say she knows I should say she's a person who
guesses." And her grimace was also, on its side, heroic. "But _she_
doesn't matter, Milly."

The girl felt she by this time could face anything. "Nobody matters,
Susie. Nobody." Which her next words, however, rather contradicted.
"Did he take it ill that I wasn't here to see him? Wasn't it really
just what he wanted--to have it out, so much more simply, with _you_?"

"We didn't have anything 'out,' Milly," Mrs. Stringham delicately
quavered.

"Didn't he awfully like you," Milly went on, "and didn't he think you
the most charming person I could possibly have referred him to for an
account of me? Didn't you hit it off tremendously together and in fact
fall quite in love, so that it will really be a great advantage for you
to have me as a common ground? You're going to make, I can see, no end
of a good thing of me."

"My own child, my own child!" Mrs. Stringham pleadingly murmured; yet
showing as she did so that she feared the effect even of deprecation.

"Isn't he beautiful and good too himself?--altogether, whatever he may
say, a lovely acquaintance to have made? You're just the right people
for me--I see it now; and do you know what, between you, you must do?"
Then as Susie still but stared, wonderstruck and holding herself: "You
must simply see me through. Any way you choose. Make it out together.
I, on my side, will be beautiful too, and we'll be--the three of us,
with whatever others, oh as many as the case requires, any one you
like!--a sight for the gods. I'll be as easy for you as carrying a
feather." Susie took it for a moment in such silence that her young
friend almost saw her--and scarcely withheld the observation--as taking
it for "a part of the disease." This accordingly helped Milly to be, as
she judged, definite and wise. "He's at any rate awfully interesting,
isn't he?--which is so much to the good. We haven't at least--as we
might have, with the way we tumbled into it--got hold of one of the
dreary."

"Interesting, dearest?"--Mrs. Stringham felt her feet firmer. "I don't
know if he's interesting or not; but I do know, my own," she continued
to quaver, "that he's just as much interested as you could possibly
desire."

"Certainly--that's it. Like all the wor