ld say, when the clue has been picked up and
retraced. There is an hour in which Milly gazes open-eyed upon her
prospect, measuring its promises and threats, gathering herself for
the effort they demand. She sits on a high Italian mountain-ledge,
with a blue plain spread out beneath her like the kingdoms of the
world; and there she looks at her future with rapt absorption, lost to
all other thought. Her mind, if we saw it, would tell us everything
then at least; she searches its deepest depth, it is evident. And that
is the very reason why her mind should not be exposed in that hour;
the troubling shapes that lurk in it are not to be described, they are
to make their presence known of their own accord. Instead of intruding
upon Milly's lonely rumination, therefore, the author elects to leave
her, to join company with her friend in the background, and in that
most crucial session to reveal nothing of Milly but the glimpse that
her friend catches of her in passing.

The glimpse, so rendered, _tells_ nothing. But in Milly's attitude,
while she sits enthroned above the world, there is a certain
expression, deep and strange, not to be missed, though who shall say
exactly what it implies? Is it hope, is it despair? At any rate the
clear picture of her remains, and a little later, when her mind is
visible again, the memory of her up there on the mountain has
quickened the eye of the onlooker. The images in her mind are not at
all portentous now; she is among her friends, she is harvesting
impressions; there is not a word of anything dark or distressing or
ill-omened. But still, but still--we have seen Milly when she believed
herself unseen, and it is certain that there is more in her mind than
now appears, and though she seems so full of the new excitement of
making friends with Kate Croy there must be some preoccupation
beneath; and then, in a flash, _these_ are the troubles that engage
her in solitude, that have ached in her mind, and yet there has never
been a single direct allusion to them. Skirting round and round them,
giving one brief sight of her in eloquent circumstances, then
displaying the all but untroubled surface of her thought on this side
and that, the author has encompassed the struggle that is proceeding
within her, and has lifted it bodily into the understanding of the
reader.

The profit which the story gains from this treatment is easily
recognized. Solidity, weight, a third dimension, is given to the
i