e're not quarrelling about it,
Kate and I, _yet."_

"I only meant," Mrs. Stringham explained, "that I don't see what Mrs.
Condrip would gain."

"By her being able to tell Kate?" Milly thought. "I only meant that I
don't see what I myself should gain."

"But it will have to come out--that he knows you both--some time."

Milly scarce assented. "Do you mean when he comes back?"

"He'll find you both here, and he can hardly be looked to, I take it,
to 'cut' either of you for the sake of the other."

This placed the question at last on a basis more distinctly cheerful.
"I might get at him somehow beforehand," the girl suggested; "I might
give him what they call here the tip--that he's not to know me when we
meet. Or, better still, I mightn't be here at all."

"Do you want to run away from him?"

It was, oddly enough, an idea Milly seemed half to accept. "I don't
know _what_ I want to run away from!"

It dispelled, on the spot--something, to the elder woman's ear, in the
sad, sweet sound of it--any ghost of any need of explaining. The sense
was constant for her that their relation was as if afloat, like some
island of the south, in a great warm sea that made, for every
conceivable chance, a margin, an outer sphere of general emotion; and
the effect of the occurrence of anything in particular was to make the
sea submerge the island, the margin flood the text. The great wave now
for a moment swept over. "I'll go anywhere else in the world you like."

But Milly came up through it. "Dear old Susie--how I do work you!"

"Oh, this is nothing yet."

"No indeed--to what it will be."

"You're not--and it's vain to pretend," said dear old Susie, who had
been taking her in, "as sound and strong as I insist on having you."

"Insist, insist--the more the better. But the day I _look_ as sound and
strong as that, you know," Milly went on--"on that day I shall be just
sound and strong enough to take leave of you sweetly for ever. That's
where one is," she continued thus agreeably to embroider, "when even
one's _most_ 'beaux moments' aren't such as to qualify, so far as
appearance goes, for anything gayer than a handsome cemetery. Since
I've lived all these years as if I were dead, I shall die, no doubt, as
if I were alive--which will happen to be as you want me. So, you see,"
she wound up, "you'll never really know where I am. Except indeed when
I'm gone; and then you'll only know where I'm not."

"I'd die _for_ you," said