re of a race-horse nervousness and of something inflexible in
the midst of an expression all flexibility. Her hands were curiously
slight and small, and as she now, in looking at her companion and in
asking her question, locked them together with a force that made them
tremble, they showed the same combination of an excessive strength
informing an excessive fragility.

Milly Quentyn's gaze drifted to her and rested upon her in silence.

Presently she smiled.

"How kind you are to care so much, to care at all!"

"I do care."

"Are you, will you, be my friend, always?" asked Milly, leaning towards
her a little, and the smile seemed to flutter to the other woman like an
appealing and grateful kiss.

"I am your friend; I will be your friend, always," Mrs. Drent replied,
in an even lower tone than before.

The tears came softly into Milly's eyes while they looked at each other
she gently, Mrs. Drent still sombrely. Then leaning back again with a
sigh, she continued, "Why I loved him? I didn't love him. Isn't that the
almost invariable answer? I was nineteen; I had just left the
schoolroom; I was in love with my own ideal of love--you know, you must
know, the silly, pathetic, sentimental and selfish mixture one is at
nineteen;--and Mamma said that he was that ideal; and he said nothing;
so I believed her! Poor Dick! He was in love, I think, really, and not a
bit with himself, and with only enough articulateness to ask me to marry
him; and of course he was, and is, very good-looking. You know Mamma.
She has married us all off very well, they say; you know how they say
it. In her determination to ensconce the family type comfortably she is
as careless of the single life as nature itself. In this case what
appeared to be a very cosy niche offered itself for me and she shoved me
into it. I have grown up since then; that is all my story."

"They are terrible, terrible, such marriages," said Mrs. Drent, looking
away.

Her tone struck Milly, with all her consciousness of pathos, as perhaps
a little misplaced. "Terrible? No, hardly that, I think. I did believe
that I loved him. He did love me."

"You were a child who did not know herself, nor what she was doing."

"Yes; that is true."

"And it is terrible for him if he still loves you."

"Oh," said Milly, with another sigh, "if you can call it love. He is
rather dismayed by the situation; sorry that we don't hit it off better,
as he would express it; jocosely resigned