The Wings of the Dove, Volume 1 of 2

imposed it, as a topic, in direct opposition to the other name that Mrs. Lowder had left in the air and that all her own look, as we have seen, kept there at first for her companion. The immediate strange effect had been that of her consciously needing, as it were, an alibi—which, successfully, she so found. She had worked it to the end, ridden it to and fro across the course marked for Milly by Aunt Maud, and now she had quite, so to speak, broken it in. 'The bore is that if she wants him so much—wants him, heaven forgive her! for me— he has put us all out, since your arrival, by wanting somebody else. I don't mean somebody else than you.'

Milly threw off the charm sufficiently to shake her head. 'Then I haven't made out who it is. If I'm any part of his alternative he had better stop where he is.'

'Truly, truly?—always, always?'

Milly tried to insist with an equal gaiety. 'Would you like me to swear?'

Kate appeared for a moment—though that was doubtless but gaiety too—to think. 'Haven't we been swearing enough?'

'You have perhaps, but I haven't, and I ought to give you the equivalent. At any rate there it is. Truly, truly as you say—'always, always.' So I'm not in the way.'

'Thanks,' said Kate—'but that doesn't help me.'

'Oh, it's as simplifying for him that I speak of it.'

'The difficulty really is that he's a person with so many ideas that it's particularly hard to simplify for him. That's exactly of course what Aunt Maud has been trying. He won't,' Kate firmly continued, 'make up his mind about me.'

'Well,' Milly smiled, 'give him time.'

Her friend met it in perfection. 'One is doing that—one is. But one remains, all the same, but one of his ideas.'

'There's no harm in that,' Milly returned, 'if you come out in the end as the best of them. What's a man,' she pursued, 'especially an ambitious one, without a variety of ideas?'

'No doubt. The more the merrier.' And Kate looked at her grandly. 'One can but hope to come out, and do nothing to prevent it.'

All of which made for the impression, fantastic or not, of the alibi. The splendour, the grandeur were, for Milly, the bold ironic spirit behind it, so interesting too in itself. What, moreover, was not less interesting was the fact, as our young woman noted it, that Kate confined her point to the difficulties, so far as she was concerned, raised only by Lord Mark. She referred now to none that her own taste might present; which circumstance again played its little part. She was doing what she liked in respect to another person, but she was in no way committed to the other person, and her furthermore talking of Lord Mark as not young and not true were only the signs of her clear self-consciousness, were all in the line of her slightly hard, but scarce the less graceful extravagance. She didn't wish to show too much her consent to be arranged for, but that was a different thing from not wishing sufficiently to give it. There was something moreover, on it all, that Milly still found occasion to say, 'If your aunt has been, as you tell me, put out by me, I feel that she has remained remarkably kind.'

'Oh, but she has—whatever might have happened in that respect—plenty of use for you! You put her in, my dear, more than you put her out. You don't half see it, but she has clutched your petticoat. You can do anything— you can do, I mean, lots that we can't. You're an outsider, independent and standing by yourself; you're not hideously relative to tiers and tiers of others.' And Kate, facing in that direction, went further and further; wound up, while Milly gaped, with extraordinary words. 'We're of no use to you—it's decent to tell you. You'd be of use to us, but that's a different matter. My honest advice to you would be—' she went indeed all lengths—'to drop us while you can. It would be funny if you didn't soon see how awfully better you can do. We've not really done for you the least thing worth speaking of—nothing you mightn't easily have had in some other way. Therefore you're under no obligation. You won't want us next year; we shall only continue to want you. But that's no reason for you, and you mustn't pay too dreadfully for poor Mrs. Stringham's having let you in. She has the best conscience in the world; she's enchanted with what she has done; but you shouldn't take your people from her. It has been quite awful to see you do it.'

Milly tried to be amused, so as not—it was too absurd—to be fairly frightened. Strange enough indeed—if not natural enough—that, late at night thus, in a mere mercenary house, with Susie away, a want of confidence should possess her. She recalled, with all the rest of it, the next day, piecing things together in the dawn, that she had felt herself alone with a creature who paced like a panther. That was a violent image, but it made her a little less ashamed of having been scared. For all her scare, none the less, she had now the sense to find words. 'And yet without Susie I shouldn't have had you.'

It had been at this point, however, that Kate flickered highest. 'Oh, you may very well loathe me yet!'

Really at last, thus, it had been too much; as, with her own least feeble flare, after a wondering watch, Milly had shown. She hadn't cared; she had too much wanted to know; and, though a small solemnity of reproach, a sombre strain, had broken into her tone, it was to figure as her nearest approach to serving Mrs. Lowder. 'Why do you say such things to me?'

This unexpectedly had acted, by a sudden turn of Kate's attitude, as a happy speech. She had risen as she spoke, and Kate had stopped before her, shining at her instantly with a softer brightness. Poor Milly hereby enjoyed one of her views of how people, wincing oddly, were often touched by her. 'Because you're a dove.' With which she felt herself ever so delicately, so considerately, embraced; not with familiarity or as a liberty taken, but almost ceremonially and in the manner of an accolade; partly as if, though a dove who could perch on a finger, one were also a princess with whom forms were to be observed. It even came to her, through the touch of her companion's lips, that this form, this cool pressure, fairly sealed the sense of what Kate had just said. It was moreover, for the girl, like an inspiration: she found herself accepting as the right one, while she caught her breath with relief, the name so given her. She met it on the instant as she would have met the revealed truth; it lighted up the strange dusk in which she lately had walked. That was what was the matter with her. She was a dove. Oh, wasn't she?—it echoed within her as she became aware of the sound, outside, of the return of their friends. There was, the next thing, little enough doubt about it after Aunt Maud had been two minutes in the room. She had come up, Mrs. Lowder, with Susan—which she needn't have done, at that hour, instead of letting Kate come down to her; so that Milly could be quite sure it was to catch hold, in some way, of the loose end they had left. Well, the way she did catch was simply to make the point that it didn't now in the least matter. She had mounted the stairs for this, and she had her moment again with her younger hostess while Kate, on the spot, as the latter at the time noted, gave Susan Shepherd unwonted opportunities. Kate was in other words, as Aunt Maud engaged her friend, listening with the handsomest response to Mrs. Stringham's impression of the scene they had just quitted. It was in the tone of the fondest indulgence—almost, really, that of dove cooing to dove—that Mrs. Lowder expressed to Milly the hope that it had all gone beautifully. Her 'all' had an ample