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 benevolence; it soothed and simplified; she spoke as if it were the two young women, not she and her comrade, who had been facing the town together.
But Milly's answer had prepared itself while Aunt Maud was on the stair; she had felt in a rush all the reasons that would make it the most dovelike; and she gave it, while she was about it, as earnest, as candid.
"I don't think, dear lady, he's here."
It gave her straightway the measure of the success she could have as a dove: that was recorded in the long look of deep criticism, a look without a word, that Mrs. Lowder poured forth.
And the word, presently, bettered it still.
"Oh, you exquisite thing!"
The luscious innuendo of it, almost startling, lingered in the room, after the visitors had gone, like an oversweet fragrance.
But left alone with Mrs. Stringham Milly continued to breathe it: she studied again the dovelike and so set her companion to mere rich reporting that she averted all inquiry into her own case.
That, with the new day, was once more her law—though she saw before her, of course, as something of a complication, her need, each time, to decide.
She should have to be clear as to how a dove would act.
She settled it, she thought, well enough this morning by quite readopting her plan in respect to Sir Luke Strett.
That, she was pleased to reflect, had originally been pitched in the key of a merely iridescent drab; and although Mrs. Stringham, after breakfast, began by staring at it as if it had been a priceless Persian carpet suddenly unrolled at her feet, she had no scruple, at the end of five minutes, in leaving her to make the best of it.
"Sir Luke Strett comes, by appointment, to see me at eleven, but I'm going out on purpose.
He's to be told, please, deceptively, that I'm at home, and, you, as my representative, when he comes up, are to see him instead.
He will like that, this time, better.