ds so easy to render that the whole thing was like court life
without the hardships. It came back of course to the question of money,
and our observant lady had by this time repeatedly reflected that if
one were talking of the "difference," it was just this, this
incomparably and nothing else, that when all was said and done most
made it. A less vulgarly, a less obviously purchasing or parading
person she couldn't have imagined; but it was, all the same, the truth
of truths that the girl couldn't get away from her wealth. She might
leave her conscientious companion as freely alone with it as possible
and never ask a question, scarce even tolerate a reference; but it was
in the fine folds of the helplessly expensive little black frock that
she drew over the grass as she now strolled vaguely off; it was in the
curious and splendid coils of hair, "done" with no eye whatever to the
_mode du jour,_ that peeped from under the corresponding indifference
of her hat, the merely personal tradition that suggested a sort of
noble inelegance; it lurked between the leaves of the uncut but
antiquated Tauchnitz volume of which, before going out, she had
mechanically possessed herself. She couldn't dress it away, nor walk it
away, nor read it away, nor think it away; she could neither smile it
away in any dreamy absence nor blow it away in any softened sigh. She
couldn't have lost it if she had tried--that was what it was to be
really rich. It had to be _the_ thing you were. When at the end of an
hour she had not returned to the house Mrs. Stringham, though the
bright afternoon was yet young, took, with precautions, the same
direction, went to join her in case of her caring for a walk. But the
purpose of joining her was in truth less distinct than that of a due
regard for a possibly preferred detachment: so that, once more, the
good lady proceeded with a quietness that made her slightly "underhand"
even in her own eyes. She couldn't help that, however, and she didn't
care, sure as she was that what she really wanted was not to overstep,
but to stop in time. It was to be able to stop in time that she went
softly, but she had on this occasion further to go than ever yet, for
she followed in vain, and at last with some anxiety, the footpath she
believed Milly to have taken. It wound up a hillside and into the
higher Alpine meadows in which, all these last days, they had so often
wanted, as they passed above or below, to stray; and then it ob