ar as to how a dove _would_ act. She
settled it, she thought, well enough this morning by quite readopting
her plan in respect to Sir Luke Strett. That, she was pleased to
reflect, had originally been pitched in the key of a merely iridescent
drab; and although Mrs. Stringham, after breakfast, began by staring at
it as if it had been a priceless Persian carpet suddenly unrolled at
her feet, she had no scruple, at the end of five minutes, in leaving
her to make the best of it. "Sir Luke Strett comes, by appointment, to
see me at eleven, but I'm going out on purpose. He's to be told,
please, deceptively, that I'm at home, and, you, as my representative,
when he comes up, are to see him instead. He will like that, this time,
better. So do be nice to him." It had taken, naturally, more
explanation, and the mention, above all, of the fact that the visitor
was the greatest of doctors; yet when once the key had been offered
Susie slipped it on her bunch, and her young friend could again feel
her lovely imagination operate. It operated in truth very much as Mrs.
Lowder's, at the last, had done the night before: it made the air heavy
once more with the extravagance of assent. It might, afresh, almost
have frightened our young woman to see how people rushed to meet her:
_had_ she then so little time to live that the road must always be
spared her? It was as if they were helping her to take it out on the
spot. Susie--she couldn't deny, and didn't pretend to--might, of a
truth, on _her_ side, have treated such news as a flash merely lurid;
as to which, to do Susie justice, the pain of it was all there. But,
none the less, the margin always allowed her young friend was all there
as well; and the proposal now made her what was it in short but
Byzantine? The vision of Milly's perception of the propriety of the
matter had, at any rate, quickly engulfed, so far as her attitude was
concerned, any surprise and any shock; so that she only desired, the
next thing, perfectly to possess the facts. Milly could easily speak,
on this, as if there were only one: she made nothing of such another as
that she had felt herself menaced. The great fact, in fine, was that
she _knew_ him to desire just now, more than anything else, to meet,
quite apart, some one interested in her. Who therefore so interested as
her faithful Susan? The only other circumstance that, by the time she
had quitted her friend, she had treated as worth mentioning was the
circumst