od
at twice their distance. Mrs. Stringham said nothing, was as mute in
fact, for the minute, as if she had "had" him, and he was the first
again to speak. When he did so, however, it was not in straight answer
to her last remark--he only started from that. He said, as he came back
to her, "Let me, you know, _see_--one must understand," almost as if he
had for the time accepted it. And what he wished to understand was
where, on the essence of the question, was the voice of Sir Luke
Strett. If they talked of not giving her up shouldn't _he_ be the one
least of all to do it? "Aren't we, at the worst, in the dark without
him?"

"Oh," said Mrs. Stringham, "it's he who has kept me going. I wired the
first night, and he answered like an angel. He'll come like one. Only
he can't arrive, at the nearest, till Thursday afternoon."

"Well then that's something."

She considered. "Something--yes. She likes him."

"Rather! I can see it still, the face with which, when he was here in
October--that night when she was in white, when she had people there
and those musicians--she committed him to my care. It was beautiful for
both of us--she put us in relation. She asked me, for the time, to take
him about; I did so, and we quite hit it off. That proved," Densher
said with a quick sad smile, "that she liked him."

"He liked _you_," Susan Shepherd presently risked.

"Ah I know nothing about that."

"You ought to then. He went with you to galleries and churches; you
saved his time for him, showed him the choicest things, and you perhaps
will remember telling me myself that if he hadn't been a great surgeon
he might really have been a great judge. I mean of the beautiful."

"Well," the young man admitted, "that's what he is--in having judged
_her_. He hasn't," he went on, "judged her for nothing. His interest in
her--which we must make the most of--can only be supremely beneficent."

He still roamed, while he spoke, with his hands in his pockets, and she
saw him, on this, as her eyes sufficiently betrayed, trying to keep his
distance from the recognition he had a few moments before partly
confessed to. "I'm glad," she dropped, "you like him!"

There was something for him in the sound of it. "Well, I do no more,
dear lady, than you do yourself. Surely _you_ like him. Surely, when he
was here, we all liked him."

"Yes, but I seem to feel I know what he thinks. And I should think,
with all the time you spent with him, you'd know i