measure of what I shall expect of you. One can't begin too soon." 

 She drew away, as from the impression of a stir on the balcony, the hand of which he had a minute before possessed himself; and the warning brought him back to attention. "You haven't even an idea if it's a case for surgery?" 

 "I dare say it may be; that is that if it comes to anything it may come to that. Of course she's in the highest hands." 

 "The doctors are after her then?" 

 "She's after them—it's the same thing. I think I'm free to say it now—she sees Sir Luke Strett." 

 It made him quickly wince. "Ah fifty thousand knives!" Then after an instant: "One seems to guess." 

 Yes, but she waved it away. "Don't guess. Only do as I tell you." 

 For a moment now, in silence, he took it all in, might have had it before him. "What you want of me then is to make up to a sick girl." 

 "Ah but you admit yourself that she doesn't affect you as sick. You understand moreover just how much—and just how little." 

 "It's amazing," he presently answered, "what you think I understand." 

 "Well, if you've brought me to it, my dear," she returned, "that has been your way of breaking me in. Besides which, so far as making up to her goes, plenty of others will." 

 Densher for a little, under this suggestion, might have been seeing their young friend on a pile of cushions and in a perpetual tea-gown, amid flowers and with drawn blinds, surrounded by the higher nobility. "Others can follow their tastes. Besides, others are free." 

 "But so are you, my dear!" 

 She had spoken with impatience, and her suddenly quitting him had sharpened it; in spite of which he kept his place, only looking up at her. "You're prodigious!" 

 "Of course I'm prodigious!"—and, as immediately happened, she gave a further sign of it that he fairly sat watching. The door from the lobby had, as she spoke, been thrown open for a gentleman who, immediately finding her within his view, advanced to greet her before the announcement of his name could reach her companion. Densher none the less felt himself brought quickly into relation; Kate's welcome to the visitor became almost precipitately an appeal to her friend, who slowly 

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