-she could always
apprehend--from pity; and the result of that perception, for the girl,
was singular: it proved to her as quickly that Kate, keeping her
secret, had been straight with her. From Kate distinctly then, as to
why she was to be pitied, Aunt Maud knew nothing, and was thereby
simply putting in evidence the fine side of her own character. This
fine side was that she could almost at any hour, by a kindled
preference or a diverted energy, glow for another interest than her
own. She exclaimed as well, at this moment, that Milly must have been
thinking, round the case, much more than she had supposed; and this
remark could, at once, affect the girl as sharply as any other form of
the charge of weakness. It was what everyone, if she didn't look out,
would soon be saying--"There's something the matter with you!" What one
was therefore one's self concerned immediately to establish was that
there was nothing at all. "I shall like to help you; I shall like, so
far as that goes, to help Kate herself," she made such haste as she
could to declare; her eyes wandering meanwhile across the width of the
room to that dusk of the balcony in which their companion perhaps a
little unaccountably lingered. She suggested hereby her impatience to
begin; she almost overtly wondered at the length of the opportunity
this friend was giving them--referring it, however, so far as words
went, to the other friend, breaking off with an amused: "How
tremendously Susie must be beautifying!"

It only marked Aunt Maud, none the less, as too preoccupied for her
allusion. The onyx eyes were fixed upon her with a polished pressure
that must signify some enriched benevolence. "Let it go, my dear. We
shall, after all, soon enough see."

"If he _has_ come back we shall certainly see," Milly after a moment
replied; "for he'll probably feel that he can't quite civilly not come
to see me. Then _there,"_ she remarked, "we shall be. It wouldn't then,
you see, come through Kate at all--it would come through him. Except,"
she wound up with a smile, "that he won't find me."

She had the most extraordinary sense of interesting her interlocutress,
in spite of herself, more than she wanted; it was as if her doom so
floated her on that she couldn't stop--by very much the same trick it
had played her with her doctor. "Shall you run away from him?"

She neglected the question, wanting only now to get off. "Then," she
went on, "you'll deal with Kate directly."