The Wings of the Dove, Volume 2

me—to help you to do as you like.'

'And also a little, won't it be,' Milly laughed, 'to save me from the consequences? Of course,' she added, 'there must first be things I like.'

'Oh I think you'll find some,' Mrs. Stringham more bravely said. 'I think there are some—as for instance just this one. I mean,' she explained, 'really having us so.'

Milly thought. 'Just as if I wanted you comfortable about him, and him the same about you? Yes—I shall get the good of it.'

Susan Shepherd appeared to wander from this into a slight confusion. 'Which of them are you talking of?'

Milly wondered an instant—then had a light. 'I'm not talking of Mr. Densher.' With which moreover she showed amusement. 'Though if you can be comfortable about Mr. Densher too so much the better.'

'Oh you meant Sir Luke Strett? Certainly he's a fine type. Do you know,' Susie continued, 'whom he reminds me of? Of our great man—Dr. Buttrick of Boston.'

Milly recognised Dr. Buttrick of Boston, but she dropped him after a tributary pause. 'What do you think, now that you've seen him, of Mr. Densher?'

It was not till after consideration, with her eyes fixed on her friend's, that Susie produced her answer. 'I think he's very handsome.'

Milly remained smiling at her, though putting on a little the manner of a teacher with a pupil. 'Well, that will do for the first time. I have done,' she went on, 'what I wanted.'

'Then that's all we want. You see there are plenty of things.'

Milly shook her head for the 'plenty.' 'The best is not to know—that includes them all. I don't—I don't know. Nothing about anything—except that you're with me. Remember that, please. There won't be anything that, on my side, for you, I shall forget. So it's all right.'

The effect of it by this time was fairly, as intended, to sustain Susie, who dropped in spite of herself into the reassuring. 'Most certainly it's all right. I think you ought to understand that he sees no reason—'

'Why I shouldn't have a grand long life?' Milly had taken it straight up, as to understand it and for a moment consider it. But she disposed of it otherwise. 'Oh of course I know that.' She spoke as if her friend's point were small.

Mrs. Stringham tried to enlarge it. 'Well, what I mean is that he didn't say to me anything that he hasn't said to yourself.'

'Really?—I would in his place!' She might have been disappointed, but she had her good humour. 'He tells me to live'—and she oddly limited the word.

It left Susie a little at sea. 'Then what do you want more?'

'My dear,' the girl presently said, 'I don't 'want,' as I assure you, anything. Still,' she added, 'I am living. Oh yes, I'm living.'

It put them again face to face, but it had wound Mrs. Stringham up. 'So am I then, you'll see!'—she spoke with the note of her recovery. Yet it was her wisdom now—meaning by it as much as she did—not to say more than that. She had risen by Milly's aid to a certain command of what was before them; the ten minutes of their talk had in fact made her more distinctly aware of the presence in her mind of a new idea. It was really perhaps an old idea with a new value; it had at all events begun during the last hour, though at first but feebly, to shine with a special light. That was because in the morning darkness had so suddenly descended—a sufficient shade of night to bring out the power of a star. The dusk might be thick yet, but the sky had comparatively cleared; and Susan Shepherd's star from this time on continued to twinkle for her. It was for the moment, after her passage with Milly, the one spark left in the heavens. She recognised, as she continued to watch it, that it had really been set there by Sir Luke Strett's visit and that the impressions immediately following had done no more than fix it. Milly's reappearance with Mr. Densher at her heels—or, so oddly perhaps, at Miss Croy's heels, Miss Croy being at Milly's—had contributed to this effect, though it was only with the lapse of the greater obscurity that Susie made that out. The obscurity had reigned during the hour of their friends' visit, faintly clearing indeed while, in one of the rooms, Kate Croy's remarkable advance to her intensified the fact that Milly and the young man were conjoined in the other. If it hadn't acquired on the spot all the intensity of which it was capable, this was because the poor lady still sat in her primary gloom, the gloom the great benignant doctor had practically left behind him.

The intensity the circumstance in question might wear to the informed imagination would have been sufficiently revealed for us, no doubt—and with other things to our purpose—in two or three of those confidential passages with Mrs. Lowder that she now permitted herself. She hadn't yet been so glad that she believed in her old friend; for if she hadn't had, at such a pass, somebody or other to believe in she should certainly have stumbled by the way. Discretion had ceased to consist of silence; silence was gross and thick, whereas wisdom should taper, however tremulously, to a point. She betook herself to Lancaster Gate the morning after the colloquy just noted; and there, in Maud Manningham's own sanctum, she gradually found relief in giving an account of herself. An account of herself was one of the things that she had long been in the habit of expecting herself regularly to give—the regularity depending of course much on such tests of merit as might, by laws beyond her control, rise in her path. She never spared herself in short a proper sharpness of conception of how she had behaved, and it was a statement that she for the most part found herself able to make. What had happened at present was that nothing, as she felt, was left of her to report to; she was all too sunk in the inevitable and the abysmal. To give an account of herself she must give it to somebody else, and her first instalment of it to her hostess was that she must please let her cry. She couldn't cry, with Milly in observation, at the hotel, which she had accordingly left for that purpose; and the power happily came to her with the good opportunity. She cried and cried at first—she confined herself to that; it was for the time the best statement of her business. Mrs. Lowder moreover intelligently took it as such, though knocking off a note or two more, as she said, while Susie sat near her table. She could resist the contagion of tears, but her patience did justice to her visitor's most vivid plea for it. 'I shall never be able, you know, to cry again—at least not ever with her; so I must take it out when I can. Even if she does herself it won't be for me to give away; for what would that be but a confession of despair? I'm not with her for that—I'm with her to be regularly sublime. Besides, Milly won't cry herself.'

'I'm sure I hope,' said Mrs. Lowder, 'that she won't have occasion to.'

'She won't even if she does have occasion. She won't shed a tear. There's something that will prevent her.'

'Oh!' said Mrs. Lowder.

'Yes, her pride,' Mrs. Stringham explained in spite of her friend's doubt, and it was with this that her