t was so prying; but she brought it out. "Will he have been
writing to her?"

"It's exactly, my dear, what I should like to know." Mrs. Lowder was at
last impatient. "Push in for yourself, and I dare say she'll tell you."

Even now, all the same, Milly had not quite fallen back. "It will be
pushing in," she continued to smile, "for _you"_ She allowed her
companion, however, no time to take this up. "The point will be that if
he _has_ been writing she may have answered."

"But what point, you subtle thing, is that?"

"It isn't subtle, it seems to me, but quite simple," Milly said, "that
if she has answered she has very possibly spoken of me."

"Very certainly indeed. But what difference will it make?"

The girl had a moment, at this, of thinking it natural that her
interlocutress herself should so fail of subtlety. "It will make the
difference that he will have written to her in answer that he knows me.
And that, in turn," our young woman explained, "will give an oddity to
my own silence."

"How so, if she's perfectly aware of having given you no opening? The
only oddity," Aunt Maud lucidly professed, "is for yourself. It's in
_her_ not having spoken."

"Ah, there we are!" said Milly.

And she had uttered it, evidently, in a tone that struck her friend.
"Then it _has_ troubled you?"

But ah, the inquiry had only to be made to bring the rare colour with
fine inconsequence, to her face. "Not, really, the least little bit!"
And, quickly feeling the need to abound in this sense, she was on the
point, to cut short, of declaring that she cared, after all, no scrap
how much she obliged. Only she felt at this instant too the
intervention of still other things. Mrs. Lowder was, in the first
place, already beforehand, already affected as by the sudden vision of
her having herself pushed too far. Milly could never judge from her
face of her uppermost motive--it was so little, in its hard, smooth
sheen, that kind of human countenance. She looked hard when she spoke
fair; the only thing was that when she spoke hard she likewise didn't
look soft. Something, none the less, had arisen in her now--a full
appreciable tide, entering by the rupture of some bar. She announced
that if what she had asked was to prove in the least a bore her young
friend was not to dream of it; making her young friend at the same
time, by the change in her tone, dream on the spot more profusely. She
spoke with a belated light, Milly could apprehend-