e of renewed
propinquity, which had a double virtue in that favouring air. He
breathed on it as if he could scarcely believe it, yet the time had
passed, in spite of this privilege, without his quite committing
himself, for her ear, to any such comment on Milly's high style and
state as would have corresponded with the amount of recognition it had
produced in him. Behind everything for him was his renewed remembrance,
which had fairly become a habit, that he had been the first to know
her. This was what they had all insisted on, in her absence, that day
at Mrs. Lowder's; and this was in especial what had made him feel its
influence on his immediately paying her a second visit. Its influence
had been all there, been in the high-hung, rumbling carriage with them,
from the moment she took him to drive, covering them in together as if
it had been a rug of softest silk. It had worked as a clear connexion
with something lodged in the past, something already their own. He had
more than once recalled how he had said to himself even at that moment,
at some point in the drive, that he was not _there_, not just as he was
in so doing it, through Kate and Kate's idea, but through Milly and
Milly's own, and through himself and _his_ own, unmistakeably--as well
as through the little facts, whatever they had amounted to, of his time
in New York.

II

There was at last, with everything that made for it, an occasion when
he got from Kate, on what she now spoke of as his eternal refrain, an
answer of which he was to measure afterwards the precipitating effect.
His eternal refrain was the way he came back to the riddle of Mrs.
Lowder's view of her profit--a view so hard to reconcile with the
chances she gave them to meet. Impatiently, at this, the girl denied
the chances, wanting to know from him, with a fine irony that smote him
rather straight, whether he felt their opportunities as anything so
grand. He looked at her deep in the eyes when she had sounded this
note; it was the least he could let her off with for having made him
visibly flush. For some reason then, with it, the sharpness dropped out
of her tone, which became sweet and sincere. "'Meet,' my dear man," she
expressively echoed; "does it strike you that we get, after all, so
very much out of our meetings?"

"On the contrary--they're starvation diet. All I mean is--and it's all
I've meant from the day I came--that we at least get more than Aunt
Maud."

"Ah but you see,"