"From Kate herself."
"That she's thinking of no one at all?"
"Of no one at all." Then, with her intensity, she went on. "She has given me her word for it."
"Oh!" said Lord Mark. To which he next added: "And what do you call her word?"
It made Milly, on her side, stare—though perhaps partly but with the instinct of gaining time for the consciousness that she was already a little further "in" than she had designed. "Why, Lord Mark, what should you call her word?"
"Ah I'm not obliged to say. I've not asked her. You apparently have."
Well, it threw her on her defence—a defence that she felt, however, especially as of Kate. "We're very intimate," she said in a moment; "so that, without prying into each other's affairs, she naturally tells me things."
Lord Mark smiled as at a lame conclusion. "You mean then she made you of her own movement the declaration you quote?"
Milly thought again, though with hindrance rather than help in her sense of the way their eyes now met—met as for their each seeing in the other more than either said. What she most felt that she herself saw was the strange disposition on her companion's part to disparage Kate's veracity. She could be only concerned to "stand up" for that.
"I mean what I say: that when she spoke of her having no private interest—"