she knew it afterwards to have been by the subtle operation of Kate.
She was herself saying that she was afraid she must go now if Susie
could be found; but she was sitting down on the nearest seat to say it.
The prospect, through opened doors, stretched before her into other
rooms, down the vista of which Lord Mark was strolling with Lady
Aldershaw, who, close to him and much intent, seemed to show from
behind as peculiarly expert. Lord Aldershaw, for his part, had been
left in the middle of the room, while Kate, with her back to him, was
standing before her with much sweetness of manner. The sweetness was
all for _her;_ she had the sense of the poor gentleman's having somehow
been handled as Lord Mark had handled his wife. He dangled there, he
shambled a little; then he bethought himself of the Bronzino, before
which, with his eyeglass, he hovered. It drew from him an odd, vague
sound, not wholly distinct from a grunt, and a "Humph--most
remarkable!" which lighted Kate's face with amusement. The next moment
he had creaked away, over polished floors, after the others, and Milly
was feeling as if _she_ had been rude. But Lord Aldershaw was in every
way a detail, and Kate was saying to her that she hoped she wasn't ill.

Thus it was that, aloft there in the great gilded historic chamber and
the presence of the pale personage on the wall, whose eyes all the
while seemed engaged with her own, she found herself suddenly sunk in
something quite intimate and humble and to which these grandeurs were
strange enough witnesses. It had come up, in the form in which she had
had to accept it, all suddenly, and nothing about it, at the same time,
was more marked than that she had in a manner plunged into it to escape
from something else. Something else, from her first vision of her
friend's appearance three minutes before, had been present to her even
through the call made by the others on her attention; something that
was perversely _there,_ she was more and more uncomfortably finding, at
least for the first moments and by some spring of its own, with every
renewal of their meeting. "Is it the way she looks to _him?"_ she asked
herself--the perversity being that she kept in remembrance that Kate
was known to him. It wasn't a fault in Kate--nor in him assuredly; and
she had a horror, being generous and tender, of treating either of them
as if it had been. To Densher himself she couldn't make it up--he was
too far away; but her seconda