y sure?"

"As sure as one can be"--and Milly's manner could match it--"when one
has every assurance. I speak on the best authority."

He hesitated. "Mrs. Lowder's?"

"No. I don't call Mrs. Lowder's the best."

"Oh I thought you were just now saying," he laughed, "that everything
about her's so good."

"Good for you"--she was perfectly clear. "For you," she went on, "let
her authority be the best. She doesn't believe what you mention, and
you must know yourself how little she makes of it. So you can take it
from her. _I_ take it--" But Milly, with the positive tremor of her
emphasis, pulled up.

"You take it from Kate?"

"From Kate herself."

"That she's thinking of no one at all?"

"Of no one at all." Then, with her intensity, she went on. "She has
given me her word for it."

"Oh!" said Lord Mark. To which he next added: "And what do you call her
word?"

It made Milly, on her side, stare--though perhaps partly but with the
instinct of gaining time for the consciousness that she was already a
little further "in" than she had designed. "Why, Lord Mark, what should
_you_ call her word?"

"Ah I'm not obliged to say. I've not asked her. You apparently have."

Well, it threw her on her defence--a defence that she felt, however,
especially as of Kate. "We're very intimate," she said in a moment; "so
that, without prying into each other's affairs, she naturally tells me
things."

Lord Mark smiled as at a lame conclusion. "You mean then she made you
of her own movement the declaration you quote?"

Milly thought again, though with hindrance rather than help in her
sense of the way their eyes now met--met as for their each seeing in
the other more than either said. What she most felt that she herself
saw was the strange disposition on her companion's part to disparage
Kate's veracity. She could be only concerned to "stand up" for that.

"I mean what I say: that when she spoke of her having no private
interest--"

"She took her oath to you?" Lord Mark interrupted.

Milly didn't quite see why he should so catechise her; but she met it
again for Kate. "She left me in no doubt whatever of her being free."

At this Lord Mark did look at her, though he continued to smile. "And
thereby in no doubt of _your_ being too?" It was as if as soon as he
had said it, however, he felt it as something of a mistake, and she
couldn't herself have told by what queer glare at him she had instantly
signified that. He at any rat