ur
Maeterlinck picture, might well have hovered in the gloaming by the
moat. It may be declared for Kate, at all events, that her sincerity
about her friend, through this time, was deep, her compassionate
imagination strong; and that these things gave her a virtue, a good
conscience, a credibility for herself, so to speak, that were later to
be precious to her. She grasped with her keen intelligence the logic of
their common duplicity, went unassisted through the same ordeal as
Milly's other hushed follower, easily saw that for the girl to be
explicit was to betray divinations, gratitudes, glimpses of the felt
contrast between her fortune and her fear--all of which would have
contradicted her systematic bravado. That was it, Kate wonderingly saw:
to recognise was to bring down the avalanche--the avalanche Milly lived
so in watch for and that might be started by the lightest of breaths;
though less possibly the breath of her own stifled plaint than that of
the vain sympathy, the mere helpless gaping inference of others. With
so many suppressions as these, therefore, between them, their
withdrawal together to unmask had to fall back, as we have hinted, on a
nominal motive--which was decently represented by a joy at the drop of
chatter. Chatter had in truth all along attended their steps, but they
took the despairing view of it on purpose to have ready, when face to
face, some view or other of something. The relief of getting out of
harness--that was the moral of their meetings; but the moral of this,
in turn, was that they couldn't so much as ask each other why harness
need be worn. Milly wore it as a general armour.

She was out of it at present, for some reason, as she hadn't been for
weeks; she was always out of it, that is, when alone, and her
companions had never yet so much as just now affected her as dispersed
and suppressed. It was as if still again, still more tacitly and
wonderfully, Eugenio had understood her, taking it from her without a
word and just bravely and brilliantly in the name, for instance, of the
beautiful day: "Yes, get me an hour alone; take them off--I don't care
where; absorb, amuse, detain them; drown them, kill them if you will:
so that I may just a little, all by myself, see where I am." She was
conscious of the dire impatience of it, for she gave up Susie as well
as the others to him--Susie who would have drowned her very self for
her; gave her up to a mercenary monster through whom she thu