ne of the common orders of chance; and yet further that it was
amusing--oh, awfully amusing!--to be able fondly to hope that there was
"something in" its having been left to crop up with such suddenness.
There seemed somehow a possibility that the ground or, as it were, the
air might, in a manner, have undergone some pleasing preparation;
though the question of this possibility would probably, after all, have
taken some threshing out. The truth, moreover--and there they were,
already, our pair, talking about it, the "truth!"--had not in fact
quite cropped out. This, obviously, in view of Mrs. Lowder's request to
her old friend.

It was accordingly on Mrs. Lowder's recommendation that nothing should
be said to Kate--it was on this rich attitude of Aunt Maud's that the
idea of an interesting complication might best hope to perch; and when,
in fact, after the colloquy we have reported Milly saw Kate again
without mentioning any name, her silence succeeded in passing muster
with her as the beginning of a new sort of fun. The sort was all the
newer by reason of its containing a small element of anxiety: when she
had gone in for fun before it had been with her hands a little more
free. Yet it _was,_ none the less, rather exciting to be conscious of a
still sharper reason for interest in the handsome girl, as Kate
continued, even now, pre-eminently to remain for her; and a
reason--this was the great point--of which the young woman herself
could have no suspicion. Twice over, thus, for two or three hours
together, Milly found herself seeing Kate, quite fixing her in the
light of the knowledge that it was a face on which Mr. Densher's eyes
had more or less familiarly rested and which, by the same token, had
looked, rather _more_ beautifully than less, into his own. She pulled
herself up indeed with the thought that it had inevitably looked, as
beautifully as one would, into thousands of faces in which one might
one's self never trace it; but just the odd result of the thought was
to intensify for the girl that side of her friend which she had
doubtless already been more prepared than she quite knew to think of as
the "other," the not wholly calculable. It was fantastic, and Milly was
aware of this; but the other side was what had, of a sudden, been
turned straight towards her by the show of Mr. Densher's propinquity.
She hadn't the excuse of knowing it for Kate's own, since nothing
whatever as yet proved it particularly to be su