As the older woman, with tear-dimmed eyes, watched the two bind themselves together for the long journey, she murmured to herself like a prayer,—"She's such a woman! Such a dear woman! She MUST be happy."
That was the secret of Milly's hold upon all her women friends: they felt the woman in her, the pure character of their sex more highly expressed in her than in any one else they knew. She was the unconscious champion of their hearts.
Again the older woman murmured prayerfully,—"What will she do with life? What will she do?"
For like the wise woman she was she knew that in most cases it is the woman who makes marriage sing like a perpetual song or become a sullen silence. All the way to her home she kept repeating to herself,—
"What will she make of it? Milly!"