sion.
"What is then," she asked, "your impression?"

Mrs. Stringham's impression seemed lost in her doubts. "How can he ever
care for her?"

Her companion, in her companion's heavy manner, sat on it. "By being
put in the way of it."

"For God's sake then," Mrs. Stringham wailed, "_put_ him in the way!
You have him, one feels, in your hand."

Maud Lowder's eyes at this rested on her friend's. "Is that your
impression of him?"

"It's my impression, dearest, of you. You handle every one."

Mrs. Lowder's eyes still rested, and Susan Shepherd now felt, for a
wonder, not less sincere by seeing that she pleased her. But there was
a great limitation. "I don't handle Kate."

It suggested something that her visitor hadn't yet had from
her--something the sense of which made Mrs. Stringham gasp. "Do you
mean Kate cares for _him?_"

That fact the lady of Lancaster Gate had up to this moment, as we know,
enshrouded, and her friend's quick question had produced a change in
her face. She blinked--then looked at the question hard; after which,
whether she had inadvertently betrayed herself or had only reached a
decision and then been affected by the quality of Mrs. Stringham's
surprise, she accepted all results. What took place in her for Susan
Shepherd was not simply that she made the best of them, but that she
suddenly saw more in them to her purpose than she could have imagined.
A certain impatience in fact marked in her this transition: she had
been keeping back, very hard, an important truth, and wouldn't have
liked to hear that she hadn't concealed it cleverly. Susie nevertheless
felt herself pass as not a little of a fool with her for not having
thought of it. What Susie indeed, however, most thought of at present,
in the quick, new light of it, was the wonder of Kate's dissimulation.
She had time for that view while she waited for an answer to her cry.
"Kate thinks she cares. But she's mistaken. And no one knows it." These
things, distinct and responsible, were Mrs. Lowder's retort. Yet they
weren't all of it. "_You_ don't know it--that must be your line. Or
rather your line must be that you deny it utterly."

"Deny that she cares for him?"

"Deny that she so much as thinks that she does. Positively and
absolutely. Deny that you've so much as heard of it."

Susie faced this new duty. "To Milly, you mean--if she asks?"

"To Milly, naturally. No one else _will_ ask."

"Well," said Mrs. Stringham after a moment, "M