tly, appealed to her, dropped into her mind the
shy conceit of some assistance, some devotion to render. Mrs.
Stringham's little life had often been visited by shy conceits--secret
dreams that had fluttered their hour between its narrow walls without,
for any great part, so much as mustering courage to look out of its
rather dim windows. But this imagination--the fancy of a possible link
with the remarkable young thing from New York--_had_ mustered courage:
had perched, on the instant, at the clearest look-out it could find,
and might be said to have remained there till, only a few months later,
it had caught, in surprise and joy, the unmistakable flash of a signal.

Milly Theale had Boston friends, such as they were, and of recent
making; and it was understood that her visit to them--a visit that was
not to be meagre--had been undertaken, after a series of bereavements,
in the interest of the particular peace that New York could not give.
It was recognised, liberally enough, that there were many
things--perhaps even too many--New York _could_ give; but this was felt
to make no difference in the constant fact that what you had most to
do, under the discipline of life, or of death, was really to feel your
situation as grave. Boston could help you to that as nothing else
could, and it had extended to Milly, by every presumption, some such
measure of assistance. Mrs. Stringham was never to forget--for the
moment had not faded, nor the infinitely fine vibration it set up in
any degree ceased--her own first sight of the striking apparition, then
unheralded and unexplained: the slim, constantly pale, delicately
haggard, anomalously, agreeably angular young person, of not more than
two-and-twenty in spite of her marks, whose hair was some how
exceptionally red even for the real thing, which it innocently
confessed to being, and whose clothes were remarkably black even for
robes of mourning, which was the meaning they expressed. It was New
York mourning, it was New York hair, it was a New York history,
confused as yet, but multitudinous, of the loss of parents, brothers,
sisters, almost every human appendage, all on a scale and with a sweep
that had required the greater stage; it was a New York legend of
affecting, of romantic isolation, and, beyond everything, it was by
most accounts, in respect to the mass of money so piled on the girl's
back, a set of New York possibilities. She was alone, she was stricken,
she was rich, and