Susan Shepherd after a moment.

"'Thanks awfully'! Then stay here for me."

"But we can't be in London for August, nor for many of all these next
weeks."

"Then we'll go back."

Susie blenched. "Back to America?"

"No, abroad--to Switzerland, Italy, anywhere. I mean by your staying
here for me," Milly pursued, "your staying with me wherever I may be,
even though we may neither of us know at the time where it is. No," she
insisted, "I _don't_ know where I am, and you never will, and it
doesn't matter--and I dare say it's quite true," she broke off, "that
everything will have to come out." Her friend would have felt of her
that she joked about it now, had not her scale from grave to gay been a
thing of such unnamable shades that her contrasts were never sharp. She
made up for failures of gravity by failures of mirth; if she hadn't,
that is, been at times as earnest as might have been liked, so she was
certain not to be at other times as easy as she would like herself. "I
must face the music. It isn't, at any rate, its 'coming out,'" she
added; "it's that Mrs. Condrip would put the fact before her to his
injury."

Her companion wondered. "But how to _his?"_

"Why, if he pretends to love her----!"

"And does he only 'pretend'?"

"I mean if, trusted by her in strange countries, he forgets her so far
as to make up to other people."

The amendment, however, brought Susie in, as if with gaiety, for a
comfortable end. "Did he make up, the false creature, to _you?"_

"No--but the question isn't of that. It's of what Kate might be made to
believe."

"That, given the fact that he evidently more or less followed up his
acquaintance with you, to say nothing of your obvious weird charm, he
must have been all ready if you had at all led him on?"

Milly neither accepted nor qualified this; she only said, after a
moment, as with a conscious excess of the pensive: "No, I don't think
she'd quite wish to suggest that I made up to _him;_ for that I should
have had to do so would only bring out his constancy. All I mean is,"
she added--and now at last, as with a supreme impatience "that her
being able to make him out a little a person who could give cause for
jealousy would evidently help her, since she's afraid of him, to do him
in her sister's mind a useful ill turn."

Susan Shepherd perceived in this explanation such signs of an appetite
for motive as would have sat gracefully even on one of her own New
England heroines.