it's
she, you see then, who has made the mystery."

Yes, Milly but wanted to see; only there was so much. "There has been
of course no particular reason." Yet that indeed was neither here nor
there. "Do you think," she asked, "he is back?"

"It will be about his time, I gather, and rather a comfort to me
definitely to know."

"Then can't you ask her yourself?"

"Ah, we never speak of him!"

It helped Milly for the moment to the convenience of a puzzled pause.
"Do you mean he's an acquaintance of whom you disapprove for her?"

Aunt Maud, as well, just hung fire. "I disapprove of _her_ for the poor
young man. She doesn't care for him."

"And _he_ cares so much----?"

"Too much, too much. And my fear is," said Mrs. Lowder, "that he
privately besets her. She keeps it to herself, but I don't want her
worried. Neither, in truth," she both generously and confidentially
concluded, "do I want _him."_

Milly showed all her own effort to meet the case. "But what can _I_ do?"

"You can find out where they are. If I myself try," Mrs. Lowder
explained, "I shall appear to treat them as if I supposed them
deceiving me."

"And you don't. You don't," Milly mused for her, "suppose them
deceiving you."

"Well," said Aunt Maud, whose fine onyx eyes failed to blink, even
though Milly's questions might have been taken as drawing her rather
further than she had originally meant to go--"well, Kate is thoroughly
aware of my views for her, and that I take her being with me, at
present, in the way she is with me, if you know what I mean, as a loyal
assent to them. Therefore as my views don't happen to provide a place,
at all, for Mr. Densher, much, in a manner, as I like him"--therefore,
therefore in short she had been prompted to this step, though she
completed her sense, but sketchily, with the rattle of her large fan.

It assisted them perhaps, however, for the moment, that Milly was able
to pick out of her sense what might serve as the clearest part of it.
"You do like him then?"

"Oh dear, yes. Don't you?"

Milly hesitated, for the question was somehow as the sudden point of
something sharp on a nerve that winced. She just caught her breath, but
she had ground for joy afterwards, she felt, in not really having
failed to choose with quickness sufficient, out of fifteen possible
answers, the one that would best serve her. She was then almost proud,
as well, that she had cheerfully smiled. "I did--three times--in New
York."