occasion clear it up—a sense produced by the mute communion between them and really the beginning, as the event was to show, of something extraordinary. It was even already a little the effect of this communion that Mrs. Stringham perceptibly faltered in her retort to Mrs. Lowder's joke. "Oh it's precisely my point that Mr. Densher can't have had vast opportunities." And then she smiled at him. "I wasn't away, you know, long." 

 It made everything, in the oddest way in the world, immediately right for him. "And I wasn't there long, either." He positively saw with it that nothing for him, so far as she was concerned, would again be wrong. "She's beautiful, but I don't say she's easy to know." 

 "Ah she's a thousand and one things!" replied the good lady, as if now to keep well with him. 

 He asked nothing better. "She was off with you to these parts before I knew it. I myself was off too—away off to wonderful parts, where I had endlessly more to see." 

 "But you didn't forget her!" Aunt Maud interposed with almost menacing archness. 

 "No, of course I didn't forget her. One doesn't forget such charming impressions. But I never," he lucidly maintained, "chattered to others about her." 

 "She'll thank you for that, sir," said Mrs. Stringham with a flushed firmness. 

 "Yet doesn't silence in such a case," Aunt Maud blandly enquired, "very often quite prove the depth of the impression?" 

 He would have been amused, hadn't he been slightly displeased, at all they seemed desirous to fasten on him. "Well, the impression was as deep as you like. But I really want Miss Theale to know," he pursued for Mrs. Stringham, "that I don't figure by any consent of my own as an authority about her." 

 Kate came to his assistance—if assistance it was—before their friend had had time to meet this charge. "You're right about her not being easy to know. One sees her with intensity—sees her more than one sees almost any one; but then one discovers that that isn't knowing her and that one may know better a person whom one doesn't 'see,' as I say, half so much." 

 The discrimination was interesting, but it brought them back to the fact of her success; and it was at that comparatively gross circumstance, now so fully placed before them, that Milly's anxious companion sat and looked—looked very much as some spectator in an old-time circus might have 

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