after a moment showed herself as having done. A strange
light humour in the matter even perhaps suddenly aiding, she met it
with a certain accommodation. "Well, say one seems to see. The point
is--!" But, fairly too full now of her question, she dropped.

"The point is will it _cure?_"

"Precisely. Is it absolutely a remedy--the specific?"

"Well, I should think we might know!" Mrs. Stringham delicately
declared.

"Ah but we haven't the complaint."

"Have you never, dearest, been in love?" Susan Shepherd enquired.

"Yes, my child; but not by the doctor's direction."

Maud Manningham had spoken perforce with a break into momentary mirth,
which operated--and happily too--as a challenge to her visitor's
spirit. "Oh of course we don't ask his leave to fall. But it's
something to know he thinks it good for us."

"My dear woman," Mrs. Lowder cried, "it strikes me we know it without
him. So that when _that's_ all he has to tell us--!"

"Ah," Mrs. Stringham interposed, "it isn't 'all.' I feel Sir Luke will
have more; he won't have put me off with anything inadequate. I'm to
see him again; he as good as told me that he'll wish it. So it won't be
for nothing."

"Then what will it be for? Do you mean he has somebody of his own to
propose? Do you mean you told him nothing?"

Mrs. Stringham dealt with these questions. "I showed him I understood
him. That was all I could do. I didn't feel at liberty to be explicit;
but I felt, even though his visit so upset me, the comfort of what I
had from you night before last."

"What I spoke to you of in the carriage when we had left her with Kate?"

"You had _seen_, apparently, in three minutes. And now that he's here,
now that I've met him and had my impression of him, I feel," said Mrs.
Stringham, "that you've been magnificent."

"Of course I've been magnificent. When," asked Maud Manningham, "was I
anything else? But Milly won't be, you know, if she marries Merton
Densher."

"Oh it's always magnificent to marry the man one loves. But we're going
fast!" Mrs. Stringham woefully smiled.

"The thing _is_ to go fast if I see the case right. What had I after
all but my instinct of that on coming back with you, night before last,
to pick up Kate? I felt what I felt--I knew in my bones the man had
returned."

"That's just where, as I say, you're magnificent. But wait," said Mrs.
Stringham, "till you've seen him."

"I shall see him immediately"--Mrs. Lowder took it up with deci