in short its
drop of rose-colour for Mrs. Lowder's own view. That was really the
view Milly had, for most of the rest of the occasion, to give herself
to immediately taking in; but it didn't prevent the continued play of
those swift cross-lights, odd beguilements of the mind, at which we
have already glanced.

Mrs. Lowder herself found it enough simply to reply, in respect to
Kate, that she was indeed a luxury to take about the world: she
expressed no more surprise than that at her "rightness" to-day. Wasn't
it by this time sufficiently manifest that it was precisely as the very
luxury she was proving that she had, from far back, been appraised and
waited for? Crude elation, however, might be kept at bay, and the
circumstance none the less demonstrated that they were all swimming
together in the blue. It came back to Lord Mark again, as he seemed
slowly to pass and repass and conveniently to linger before them; he
was personally the note of the blue--like a suspended skein of silk
within reach of the broiderer's hand. Aunt Maud's free-moving shuttle
took a length of him at rhythmic intervals; and one of the intermixed
truths that flickered across to Milly was that he ever so consentingly
knew he was being worked in. This was almost like an understanding with
her at Mrs. Lowder's expense, which she would have none of; she
wouldn't for the world have had him make any such point as that he
wouldn't have launched them at Matcham--or whatever it was he _had_
done--only for Aunt Maud's _beaux yeux._ What he had done, it would
have been guessable, was something he had for some time been desired in
vain to do; and what they were all now profiting by was a change
comparatively sudden, the cessation of hope delayed. What had caused
the cessation easily showed itself as none of Milly's business; and she
was luckily, for that matter, in no real danger of hearing from him
directly that her individual weight had been felt in the scale. Why
then indeed was it an effect of his diffused but subdued participation
that he might absolutely have been saying to her "Yes, let the dear
woman take her own tone? Since she's here she may stay," he might have
been adding--"for whatever she can make of it. But you and I are
different." Milly knew _she_ was different in truth--his own difference
was his own affair; but also she knew that, after all, even at their
distinctest, Lord Mark's "tips" in this line would be tacit. He
practically placed he