Mrs. Lowder might well have thought, yet, oddly,
this pulled her up. " You can't do it without?"

Milly was almost ashamed to be raising so many
difficulties. " I ll do what I can if you ll kindly tell
me one thing more." She faltered a little it was
so prying; but she brought it out. " Will he have
been writing to her?"

"It's exactly, my dear, what I should like to
know." Mrs. Lowder was at last impatient.
"Push in for yourself, and I dare say she ll tell
you."

Even now, all the same, Milly had not quite fallen
back. " It will be pushing in," she continued to
smile, " for you" She allowed her companion,
however, no time to take this up. " The point will
be that if he has been writing she may have an
swered."

"But what point, you subtle thing, is that?"

"It isn't subtle, it seems to me, but quite simple,"
Milly said, " that if she has answered she has very
possibly spoken of me."

"Very certainly indeed. But what difference
will it make?"

The girl had a moment, at this, of thinking it nat
ural that her interlocutress herself should so fail of
subtlety. " It will make the difference that he will
have written to her in answer that he knows me.
And that, in turn," our young woman explained,
"will give an oddity to my own silence."

"How so, if she's perfectly aware of having given

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