an easy exchange of
enthusiasms in respect to the remedial properties of "Europe"; and this
assurance, as the facts came back to her, she was now able to give.
"Nothing whatever, on my word of honour, that you mayn't know or
mightn't then have known. I've no secret with him about you. What makes
you suspect it? I don't quite make out how you know I did see him
alone."

"No--you never told me," said Milly. "And I don't mean," she went on,
"during the twenty-four hours while I was bad, when your putting your
heads together was natural enough. I mean after I was better--the last
thing before you went home."

Mrs. Stringham continued to wonder. "Who told you I saw him then?"

_"He_ didn't himself--nor did you write me it afterwards. We speak of
it now for the first time. That's exactly why!" Milly declared--with
something in her face and voice that, the next moment, betrayed for her
companion that she had really known nothing, had only conjectured and,
chancing her charge, made a hit. Yet why had her mind been busy with
the question? "But if you're not, as you now assure me, in his
confidence," she smiled, "it's no matter."

"I'm not in his confidence, and he had nothing to confide. But are you
feeling unwell?"

The elder woman was earnest for the truth, though the possibility she
named was not at all the one that seemed to fit--witness the long climb
Milly had just indulged in. The girl showed her constant white face,
but that her friends had all learned to discount, and it was often
brightest when superficially not bravest. She continued for a little
mysteriously to smile. "I don't know--haven't really the least idea.
But it might be well to find out."

Mrs. Stringham, at this, flared into sympathy. "Are you in trouble--in
pain?"

"Not the least little bit. But I sometimes wonder----!"

"Yes"--she pressed: "wonder what?"

"Well, if I shall have much of it."

Mrs. Stringham stared. "Much of what? Not of pain?"

"Of everything. Of everything I have."

Anxiously again, tenderly, our friend cast about. "You 'have'
everything; so that when you say 'much' of it----"

"I only mean," the girl broke in, "shall I have it for long? That is if
I _have_ got it."

She had at present the effect, a little, of confounding, or at least of
perplexing her comrade, who was touched, who was always touched, by
something helpless in her grace and abrupt in her turns, and yet
actually half made out in her a sort of mocking lig