e was what had been in question between them. He
had presented himself at the hotel, had found her and had found Susan
Shepherd at home, had been "civil" to Susan--it was just that shade,
and Susan's fancy had fondly caught it; and then had come again and
missed them, and then had come and found them once more: besides
letting them easily see that if it hadn't by this time been the end of
everything--which they could feel in the exhausted air, that of the
season at its last gasp--the places they might have liked to go to were
such as they would have had only to mention. Their feeling was--or at
any rate their modest general plea--that there was no place they would
have liked to go to; there was only the sense of finding they liked,
wherever they were, the place to which they had been brought. Such was
highly the case as to their current consciousness--which could be
indeed, in an equally eminent degree, but a matter of course;
impressions this afternoon having by a happy turn of their wheel been
gathered for them into a splendid cluster, an offering like an armful
of the rarest flowers. They were in presence of the offering--they had
been led up to it; and if it had been still their habit to look at each
other across distances for increase of unanimity his hand would have
been silently named between them as the hand applied to the wheel. He
had administered the touch that, under light analysis, made the
difference--the difference of their not having lost, as Susie on the
spot and at the hour phrased it again and again, both for herself and
for such others as the question might concern, so beautiful and
interesting an experience; the difference also, in fact, of Mrs.
Lowder's not having lost it either, though it was with Mrs. Lowder,
superficially, they had come, and though it was further with that lady
that our young woman was directly engaged during the half-hour or so of
her most agreeably inward response to the scene.

The great historic house had, for Milly, beyond terrace and garden, as
the centre of an almost extravagantly grand Watteau-composition, a tone
as of old gold kept "down" by the quality of the air, summer
full-flushed, but attuned to the general perfect taste. Much, by her
measure, for the previous hour, appeared, in connection with this
revelation of it, to have happened to her--a quantity expressed in
introductions of charming new people, in walks through halls of armour,
of pictures, of cabinets, of