VI

"Go to her straight—be nice to her: you must have plenty to say. YOU stay with me—we have our affair." The latter of these commands the Duchess addressed to Mr. Mitchett, while their companion, in obedience to the former and affected, as it seemed, by an unrepressed familiar accent that stirred a fresh flicker of Mitchy's grin, met the new arrival in the middle of the room before Mrs. Brookenham had had time to reach her. The Duchess, quickly reseated, watched an instant the inexpressive concussion of the tall brother and sister; then while Mitchy again subsided into his place, "You're not, as a race, clever, you're not delicate, you're not sane, but you're capable of extraordinary good looks," she resumed. "Vous avez parfois la grande beaute."

Mitchy was much amused. "Do you really think Petherton has?"

The Duchess withstood it. "They've got, both outside and in, the same great general things, only turned, in each, rather different ways, a way safer for him as a man, and more triumphant for her as—whatever you choose to call her! What CAN a woman do," she richly mused, "with such beauty as that—?"

"Except come desperately to advise with Mrs. Brook"—Mitchy undertook to complete her question—"as to the highest use to make of it? But see," he immediately added, "how perfectly competent to instruct her our friend now looks." Their hostess had advanced to Lady Fanny with an outstretched hand but with an eagerness of greeting merged a little in the sweet predominance of wonder as well as in the habit, at such moments most perceptible, of the languid lily-bend. Nothing in general could have been less conventionally poor than the kind of reception given in Mrs. Brookenham's drawing-room to the particular element—the element of physical splendour void of those disparities that make the question of others tiresome—comprised in Lady Fanny's presence. It was a place in which, at all times, before interesting objects, the unanimous occupants, almost more concerned for each other's vibrations than for anything else, were apt rather more to exchange sharp and silent searchings than to fix their eyes on the object itself. In the case of Lady Fanny, however, the object itself—and quite by the same law that had worked, though less profoundly, on the entrance of little Aggie—superseded the usual rapt communion very much in the manner of some beautiful tame tigress who might really coerce attention. There was in Mrs. Brookenham's way of looking up at her a dim despairing abandonment of the idea of any common personal ground. Lady Fanny, magnificent, simple, stupid, had almost the stature of her brother, a forehead unsurpassably low and an air of sombre concentration just sufficiently corrected by something in her movements that failed to give it a point. Her blue eyes were heavy in spite of being perhaps a couple of shades too clear, and the wealth of her black hair, the disposition of the massive coils of which was all her own, had possibly a satin sheen depreciated by the current fashion. But the great thing in her was that she was, with unconscious heroism, thoroughly herself; and what were Mrs. Brook and Mrs. Brook's intimates after all, in their free surrender to the play of perception, but a happy association for keeping her so? The Duchess was moved to the liveliest admiration by the grand simple sweetness of her encounter with Mrs. Donner, a combination indeed in which it was a question if she or Mrs. Brook appeared to the higher advantage. It was poor Mrs. Donner—not, like Mrs. Brook, subtle in sufficiency, nor, like Lady Fanny, almost too simple—who made the poorest show. The Duchess immediately marked it to Mitchy as infinitely characteristic that their hostess, instead of letting one of her visitors go, kept them together by some sweet ingenuity and while Lord Petherton, dropping his sister, joined Edward and Aggie in the other angle, sat there between them as if, in pursuance of some awfully clever line of her own, she were holding a hand of each. Mr. Mitchett of course did justice all round, or at least, as would have seemed from an enquiry he presently made, wished not to fail of it. "Is it your real impression then that Lady Fanny has serious grounds—"

"For jealousy of that preposterous little person? My dear Mitchett," the Duchess resumed after a moment's reflexion, "if you're so rash as to ask me in any of these connexions for my 'real' impression you deserve whatever you may get." The penalty Mitchy had incurred was apparently grave enough to make his companion just falter in the infliction of it; which gave him the opportunity of replying that the little person was perhaps not more preposterous than any one else, that there was something in her he rather liked, and that there were many different ways in which a woman could be interesting. This further levity it was therefore that laid him fully open. "Do you mean to say you've been living with Petherton so long without becoming aware that he's shockingly worried?"

"My dear Duchess," Mitchy smiled, "Petherton carries his worries with a bravery! They're so many that I've long since ceased to count them; and in general I've been disposed to let those pass that I can't help him to meet. YOU'VE made, I judge," he went on, "a better use of opportunities perhaps not so good—such as at any rate enables you to see further than I into the meaning of the impatience he just now expressed."

The Duchess was admirable, in conversation, for neglecting everything not essential to her present plausibility. "A woman like Lady Fanny can have no 'grounds' for anything—for any indignation, I mean, or for any revenge worth twopence. In this particular case at all events they've been sacrificed with such extravagance that, as an injured wife, she hasn't had the gumption to keep back an inch or two to stand on. She can do absolutely nothing."

"Then you take the view—?" Mitchy, who had, after all, his delicacies, pulled up as at sight of a name.

"I take the view," said the Duchess, "and I know exactly why. Elle se les passe—her little fancies! She's a phenomenon, poor dear. And all with—what shall I call it?—the absence of haunting remorse of a good house-mother who makes the family accounts balance. She looks—and it's what they love her for here when they say 'Watch her now!'—like an angry saint; but she's neither a saint nor, to be perfectly fair to her, really angry at all. She has only just enough reflexion to make out that it may some day be a little better for her that her husband shall, on his side too, have committed himself; and she's only, in secret, too pleased to be sure whom it has been with. All the same I must tell you," the Duchess still more crisply added, "that our little friend Nanda is of the opinion—which I gather her to be quite ready to defend—that Lady Fanny's wrong."

Poor Mitchy found himself staring. "But what has our little friend Nanda to do with it?"

"What indeed, bless her heart? If you WILL ask questions, however, you must take, as I say, your risks. There are days when between you all you stupefy me. One of them was when I happened about a month ago to make some allusion to the charming example of Mr. Cashmore's fine taste that we have there before us: what was my surprise at the tone taken by Mrs. Brook to deny on this little lady's behalf the soft impeachment? It was quite a mistake that anything had happened—Mrs. Donner had pulled through unscathed. She had been but a day or two at the most in danger, for her family and friends—the best influences—had rallied to her support: the flurry was all over. She was now perfectly safe. Do you think she looks so?" the Duchess asked.

This was not a point that Mitchy was conscious of freedom of mind to examine. "Do I understand you that Nanda was her mother's authority—?"

"For the exact shade of the intimacy of the two friends and the state of Mrs. Brook's information? Precisely—it was 'the latest before going to press.' 'Our own correspondent'! Her mother quoted her."

Mr. Mitchett visibly wondered. "But how should Nanda know—?"

"Anything about the matter? How should she NOT know everything? You've not, I suppose, lost sight of the fact that this lady and Mrs. Grendon are sisters. Carrie's situation and Carrie's perils are naturally very present to the extremely unoccupied Tishy, who is unhappily married into the bargain, who has no children, and whose house, as you may imagine, has a good thick atmosphere of partisanship. So, as with Nanda, on HER side, there's no more absorbing interest than her dear friend Tishy, with whom she's at present staying and under whose roof she perpetually meets this victim of unjust aspersions—!"

"I see the whole thing from here, you imply?" Mr. Mitchett, under the influence of this rapid evocation, had already taken his line. "Well," he said bravely, "Nanda's not a fool."

A momentary silence on the part of the Duchess might have been her tribute to his courage. "No. I don't agree with her, as it happens, here; but that there are matters as to which she's not in general at all befogged is exactly the worst I ever said of her. And I hold that in putting it so—on the basis of my little anecdote—you clearly give out that you're answered."

Mitchy turned it over. "Answered?"

"In the quarrel that a while back you sought to pick with me. What I touched on to her mother was the peculiar range of aspects and interests she's compelled to cultivate by the special intimacies that Mrs. Brook permits her. There they are—and that's all I said. Judge them for yourself."

The Duchess had risen as she spoke, which was also what Mrs. Donner and Mrs. Brookenham had done; and Mr. Mitchett was on his feet as well, to act on this last admonition. Mrs. Donner was taking leave, and there occurred among the three ladies in connexion with the circumstance a somewhat striking exchange of endearments. Mr. Mitchett, observing this, expressed himself suddenly as diverted. "By Jove, they're kissing—she's in Lady Fanny's arms!" But his hilarity was still to deepen. "And Lady Fanny, by Jove, is in Mrs. Brook's!"

"Oh it's all beyond ME!" the Duchess cried; and the little wail of her baffled imagination had almost the austerity of a complaint.

"Not a bit—they're all right. Mrs. Brook has acted!" Mitchy went on.

"Ah it isn't that she doesn't 'act'!" his interlocutress ejaculated.

Mrs. Donner's face presented, as she now crossed the room, something that resembled the ravage of a death-struggle between its artificial and its natural elegance. "Well," Mitchy said with decision as he caught it—"I back Nanda." And while a whiff of derision reached him from the Duchess, "Nothing HAS happened!" he murmured.

As to reward him for an indulgence that she must much more have divined than overheard the visitor approached him with her sweet bravery of alarm. "I go on Thursday to my sister's, where I shall find Nanda Brookenham. Can I take her any message from you?"

Mr. Mitchett showed a rosiness that might positively have been reflected. "Why should you dream of her expecting one?"

"Oh," said the Duchess with a cheer that but half carried off her asperity, "Mrs. Brook must have told Mrs. Donner to ask you!"

The latter lady, at this, rested strange eyes on the speaker, and they had perhaps something to do with a quick flare of Mitchy's wit. "Tell her, please—if, as I suppose, you came here to ask the same of her mother—that I adore her still more for keeping in such happy relations with you as enable me thus to meet you."

Mrs. Donner, overwhelmed, took flight with a nervous laugh, leaving Mr. Mitchett and the Duchess still confronted. Nothing had passed between the two ladies, yet it was as if there were a trace of something in the eyes of the elder, which, during a moment's silence, moved from the retreating visitor, now formally taken over at the door by Edward Brookenham, to Lady Fanny and her hostess, who, in spite of the embraces just performed, had again subsided together while Mrs. Brook gazed up in exalted intelligence. "It's a funny house," said the Duchess at last. "She makes me such a scene over my not bringing Aggie, and still more over my very faint hint of my reasons for it, that I fly off, in compunction, to do what I can, on the spot, to repair my excess of prudence. I reappear, panting, with my niece—and it's to THIS company I introduce her!"

Her companion looked at the charming child, to whom Lord Petherton was talking with evident kindness and gaiety—a conjunction that evidently excited Mitchy's interest. "May WE then know her?" he asked with an effect of drollery. "May I—if HE may?"

The Duchess's eyes, turned to him, had taken another light. He even gaped a little at their expression, which was in a manner carried out by her tone. "Go and talk to her, you perverse creature, and send him over to me." Lord Petherton, a minute later, had joined her; old Edward had left the room with Mrs. Donner; his wife and Lady Fanny were still more closely engaged; and the young Agnesina, though visibly a little scared at Mitchy's queer countenance, had begun, after the fashion he had touched on to Mrs. Brook, politely to invoke the aid of the idea of habit. "Look here—you must help me," the Duchess said to Petherton. "You can, perfectly—and it's the first thing I've yet asked of you."

"Oh, oh, oh!" her interlocutor laughed.

"I must have Mitchy," she went on without noticing his particular shade of humour.

"Mitchy too?"—he appeared to wish to leave her in no doubt of it.

"How low you are!" she simply said. "There are times when I despair of you. He's in every way your superior, and I like him so that—well, he must like HER. Make him feel that he does."

Lord Petherton turned it over as something put to him practically. "I could wish for him that he would. I see in her possibilities—!" he continued to laugh.

"I dare say you do. I see them in Mitchett, and I trust you'll understand me when I say I appeal to you."

"Appeal to HIM straight. That's much better," Petherton lucidly observed.

The Duchess wore for a moment her proudest air, which made her, in the connexion, exceptionally gentle. "He doesn't like me."

Her interlocutor looked at her with all his bright brutality. "Oh my dear, I can speak for you—if THAT'S what you want!"

The Duchess met his eyes, and so for an instant they sounded each other. "You're so abysmally coarse that I often wonder—!" But as the door reopened she caught herself. It was the effect of a face apparently directed at her. "Be quiet. Here's old Edward."



BOOK THIRD. MR. LONGDON

If Mitchy arrived exactly at the hour it was quite by design and on a calculation—over and above the prized little pleasure it might give him—of ten minutes clear with his host, whom it rarely befell him to see alone. He had a theory of something special to go into, of a plummet to sink or a feeler to put forth; his state of mind in short was diplomatic and anxious. But his hopes had a drop as he crossed the threshold. His precaution had only assured him the company of a stranger, for the person in the room to whom the servant announced him was not old Van. On the other hand this gentleman would clearly be old—what was it? the fellow Vanderbank had made it a matter of such importance he should "really know." But were they then simply to have tea there together? No; the candidate for Mr. Mitchett's acquaintance, as if quickly guessing his apprehension, mentioned on the spot that their entertainer would be with them: he had just come home in a hurry, fearing he was late, and then had rushed off to make a change. "Fortunately," said the speaker, who offered his explanation as if he had had it on his mind—"fortunately the ladies haven't yet come."

"Oh there ARE to be ladies?"—Mr. Mitchett was all response. His fellow guest, who was shy and apparently nervous, sidled about a little, swinging an eye-glass, yet glancing in a manner a trifle birdlike from object to object. "Mrs. Edward Brookenham I think."

"Oh!" Mitchy himself felt, as soon as this comment had quitted his lips, that it might sound even to a stranger like a sign, such as the votaries of Mrs. Edward Brookenham had fallen into the way of constantly throwing off, that he recognised her hand in the matter. There was, however, something in his entertainer's face that somehow encouraged frankness; it had the sociability of surprise—it hadn't the chill. Mitchy saw at the same time that this friend of old Van's would never really understand him; though that was a thing he at times liked people as much for as he liked them little for it at others. It was in fact when he most liked that he was on the whole most tempted to mystify. "Only Mrs. Brook?—no others?"

"'Mrs. Brook'?" his elder echoed; staring an instant as if literally missing the connexion; but quickly after, to show he was not stupid—and indeed it seemed to show he was delightful—smiling with extravagant intelligence. "Is that the right thing to say?"

Mitchy gave the kindest of laughs. "Well, I dare say I oughtn't to."

"Oh I didn't mean to correct you," his interlocutor hastened to profess; "I meant on the contrary, will it be right for me too?"

Mitchy's great goggle attentively fixed him. "Try it."

"To HER?"

"To every one."

"To her husband?"

"Oh to Edward," Mitchy laughed again, "perfectly!"

"And must I call him 'Edward'?"

"Whatever you do will be right," Mitchy returned—"even though it should happen to be sometimes what I do."

His companion, as if to look at him with a due appreciation of this, stopped swinging the nippers and put them on. "You people here have a pleasant way—!"

"Oh we HAVE!"—Mitchy, taking him up, was gaily emphatic. He began, however, already to perceive the mystification which in this case was to be his happy effect.

"Mr. Vanderbank," his victim remarked with perhaps a shade more of reserve, "has told me a good deal about you." Then as if, in a finer manner, to keep the talk off themselves: "He knows a great many ladies."

"Oh yes, poor chap, he can't help it. He finds a lady wherever he turns."

The stranger took this in, but seemed a little to challenge it. "Well, that's reassuring, if one sometimes fancies there are fewer."

"Fewer than there used to be?—I see what you mean," said Mitchy. "But if it has struck you so, that's awfully interesting." He glared and grinned and mused. "I wonder."

"Well, we shall see." His friend seemed to wish not to dogmatise.

"SHALL we?" Mitchy considered it again in its high suggestive light. "You will—but how shall I?" Then he caught himself up with a blush. "What a beastly thing to say—as if it were mere years that make you see it!"

His companion this time gave way to the joke. "What else can it be—if I've thought so?"

"Why, it's the facts themselves, and the fine taste, and above all something qui ne court pas les rues, an approach to some experience of what a lady IS." The young man's acute reflexion appeared suddenly to flower into a vision of opportunity that swept everything else away. "Excuse my insisting on your time of life—but you HAVE seen some?" The question was of such interest that he had already begun to follow it. "Oh the charm of talk with some one who can fill out one's idea of the really distinguished women of the past! If I could get you," he continued, "to be so awfully valuable as to fill out mine!"

His fellow visitor, on this, made, in a pause, a nearer approach to taking visibly his measure. "Are you sure you've got an idea?" Mr. Mitchett brightly thought. "No. That must be just why I appeal to you. And it can't therefore be for confirmation, can it?" he went on. "It must be for the beautiful primary hint altogether."

His interlocutor began, with a shake of the eyeglass, to shift and sidle again, as if distinctly excited by the subject. But it was as if his very excitement made the poor gentleman a trifle coy. "Are there no nice ones now?"

"Oh yes, there must be lots. In fact I know quantities."

This had the effect of pulling the stranger up. "Ah 'quantities'! There it is."

"Yes," said Mitchy, "fancy the 'lady' in her millions. Have you come up to London, wondering, as you must, about what's happening—for Vanderbank mentioned, I think, that you HAVE come up—in pursuit of her?"

"Ah," laughed the subject of Vanderbank's information, "I'm afraid 'pursuit,' with me, is over."

"Why, you're at the age," Mitchy returned, "of—the most exquisite form of it. Observation."

"Yet it's a form, I seem to see, that you've not waited for my age to cultivate." This was followed by a decisive headshake. "I'm not an observer. I'm a hater."

"That only means," Mitchy explained, "that you keep your observation for your likes—which is more admirable than prudent. But between my fear in the one direction and my desire in the other," he lightly added, "I scarcely know how to present myself. I must study the ground. Meanwhile HAS old Van told you much about me?"

Old Van's possible confidant, instead of immediately answering, again assumed the pince-nez. "Is that what you call him?"

"In general, I think—for shortness."

"And also"—the speaker hesitated—"for esteem?"

Mitchy laughed out. "For veneration! Our disrespects, I think, are all tender, and we wouldn't for the world do to a person we don't like anything so nice as to call him, or even to call her, don't you know—?"

His questioner had quickly looked as if he knew. "Something pleasant and vulgar?"

Mitchy's gaiety deepened. "That discrimination's our only austerity. You must fall in."

"Then what will you call ME?"

"What can we?" After which, sustainingly, "I'm 'Mitchy,'" our friend stated.

His interlocutor looked slightly queer. "I don't think I can quite begin. I'm Mr. Longdon," he almost blushed to articulate.

"Absolutely and essentially—that's exactly what I recognise. I defy any one to see you," Mitchy declared, "as anything else, and on that footing you'll be, among us, unique."

Mr. Longdon appeared to accept his prospect of isolation with a certain gravity. "I gather from you—I've gathered indeed from Mr. Vanderbank—that you're a little sort of a set that hang very much together."

"Oh yes; not a formal association nor a secret society—still less a 'dangerous gang' or an organisation for any definite end. We're simply a collection of natural affinities," Mitchy explained; "meeting perhaps principally in Mrs. Brook's drawing-room—though sometimes also in old Van's, as you see, sometimes even in mine—and governed at any rate everywhere by Mrs. Brook, in our mysterious ebbs and flows, very much as the tides are governed by the moon. As I say," Mitchy pursued, "you must join. But if Van has got hold of you," he added, "or you've got hold of him, you HAVE joined. We're not quite so numerous as I could wish, and we want variety; we want just what I'm sure you'll bring us—a fresh eye, an outside mind."

Mr. Longdon wore for a minute the air of a man knowing but too well what it was to be asked to put down his name. "My friend Vanderbank swaggers so little that it's rather from you than from himself that I seem to catch the idea—!"

"Of his being a great figure among us? I don't know what he may have said to you or have suppressed; but you can take it from me—as between ourselves, you know—that he's very much the best of us. Old Van in fact—if you really want a candid opinion," and Mitchy shone still brighter as he talked, "is formed for a distinctly higher sphere. I should go so far as to say that on our level he's positively wasted."

"And are you very sure you're not?" Mr. Longdon asked with a smile.

"Dear no—I'm in my element. My element's to grovel before Van. You've only to look at me, as you must already have made out, to see I'm everything dreadful that he isn't. But you've seen him for yourself—I needn't tell you!" Mitchy sighed.

Mr. Longdon, as under the coercion of so much confidence, had stood in place longer than for any previous moment, and the spell continued for a minute after Mitchy had paused. Then nervously and abruptly he turned away, his friend watching him rather aimlessly wander. "Our host has spoken of you to me in high terms," he said as he came back. "You'd have no fault to find with them."

Mitchy took it with his highest light. "I know from your taking the trouble to remember that, how much what I've said of him pleases and touches you. We're a little sort of religion then, you and I; we're an organisation of two, at any rate, and we can't help ourselves. There—that's settled." He glanced at the clock on the chimney. "But what's the matter with him?"

"You gentlemen dress so much," said Mr. Longdon.

Mitchy met the explanation quite halfway. "I try to look funny—but why should Apollo in person?"

Mr. Longdon weighed it. "Do you think him like Apollo?"

"The very image. Ask any of the women!"

"But do I know—?"

"How Apollo must look?" Mitchy considered. "Why the way it works is that it's just from Van's appearance they get the tip, and that then, don't you see? they've their term of comparison. Isn't it what you call a vicious circle? I borrow a little their vice."

Mr. Longdon, who had once more been arrested, once more sidled away. Then he spoke from the other side of the expanse of a table covered with books for which the shelves had no space—covered with portfolios, with well-worn leather-cased boxes, with documents in neat piles. The place was a miscellany, yet not a litter, the picture of an admirable order. "If we're a fond association of two, you and I, let me, accepting your idea, do what, this way, under a gentleman's roof and while enjoying his hospitality, I should in ordinary circumstances think perhaps something of a breach."

"Oh strike out!" Mitchy laughed. It possibly chilled his interlocutor, who again hung fire so long that he himself at last adopted his image. "Why doesn't he marry, you mean?"

Mr. Longdon fairly flushed with recognition. "You're very deep, but with what we perceive—why doesn't he?"

Mitchy continued visibly to have his amusement, which might have been, this time and in spite of the amalgamation he had pictured, for what "they" perceived. But he threw off after an instant an answer clearly intended to meet the case. "He thinks he hasn't the means. He has great ideas of what a fellow must offer a woman."

Mr. Longdon's eyes travelled a while over the amenities about him. "He hasn't such a view of himself alone—?"

"As to make him think he's enough as he stands? No," said Mitchy, "I don't fancy he has a very awful view of himself alone. And since we ARE burning this incense under his nose," he added, "it's also my impression that he has no private means. Women in London cost so much."

Mr. Longdon had a pause. "They come very high, I dare say."

"Oh tremendously. They want so much—they want everything. I mean the sort of women he lives with. A modest man—who's also poor—isn't in it. I give you that at any rate as his view. There are lots of them that would—-and only too glad—'love him for himself'; but things are much mixed, and these not necessarily the right ones, and at all events he doesn't see it. The result of which is that he's waiting."

"Waiting to feel himself in love?"

Mitchy just hesitated. "Well, we're talking of marriage. Of course you'll say there are women with money. There ARE"—he seemed for a moment to meditate—"dreadful ones!"

The two men, on this, exchanged a long regard. "He mustn't do that."

Mitchy again hesitated. "He won't."

Mr. Longdon had also a silence, which he presently terminated by one of his jerks into motion. "He shan't!"

Once more Mitchy watched him revolve a little, but now, familiarly yet with a sharp emphasis, he himself resumed their colloquy. "See here, Mr. Longdon. Are you seriously taking him up?"

Yet again, at the tone of this appeal, the old man perceptibly coloured. It was as if his friend had brought to the surface an inward excitement, and he laughed for embarrassment. "You see things with a freedom—"

"Yes, and it's so I express them. I see them, I know, with a raccourci; but time after all rather presses, and at any rate we understand each other. What I want now is just to say"—and Mitchy spoke with a simplicity and a gravity he had not yet used—"that if your interest in him should at any time reach the point of your wishing to do something or other (no matter what, don't you see?) FOR him—!"

Mr. Longdon, as he faltered, appeared to wonder, but emitted a sound of gentleness. "Yes?"

"Why," said the stimulated Mitchy, "do, for God's sake, just let me have a finger in it."

Mr. Longdon's momentary mystification was perhaps partly but the natural effect of constitutional prudence. "A finger?"

"I mean—let me help."

"Oh!" breathed the old man thoughtfully and without meeting his eyes.

Mitchy, as if with more to say, watched him an instant, then before speaking caught himself up. "Look out—here he comes."

Hearing the stir of the door by which he had entered he looked round; but it opened at first only to admit Vanderbank's servant. "Miss Brookenham!" the man announced; on which the two gentlemen in the room were—audibly, almost violently—precipitated into a union of surprise.



II

However she might have been discussed Nanda was not one to shrink, for, though she drew up an instant on failing to find in the room the person whose invitation she had obeyed, she advanced the next moment as if either of the gentlemen before her would answer as well. "How do you do, Mr. Mitchy? How do you do, Mr. Longdon?" She made no difference for them, speaking to the elder, whom she had not yet seen, as if they were already acquainted. There was moreover in the air of that personage at this juncture little to invite such a confidence: he appeared to have been startled, in the oddest manner, into stillness and, holding out no hand to meet her, only stared rather stiffly and without a smile. An observer disposed to interpret the scene might have fancied him a trifle put off by the girl's familiarity, or even, as by a singular effect of her self-possession, stricken into deeper diffidence. This self-possession, however, took on her own part no account of any awkwardness: it seemed the greater from the fact that she was almost unnaturally grave, and it overflowed in the immediate challenge: "Do you mean to say Van isn't here? I've come without mother—she said I could, to see HIM," she went on, addressing herself more particularly to Mitchy. "But she didn't say I might do anything of that sort to see YOU."

If there was something serious in Nanda and something blank in their companion, there was, superficially at least, nothing in Mr. Mitchett but his usual flush of gaiety. "Did she really send you off this way alone?" Then while the girl's face met his own with the clear confession of it: "Isn't she too splendid for anything?" he asked with immense enjoyment. "What do you suppose is her idea?" Nanda's eyes had now turned to Mr. Longdon, whom she fixed with her mild straightness; which led to Mitchy's carrying on and repeating the appeal. "Isn't Mrs. Brook charming? What do you suppose is her idea?"

It was a bound into the mystery, a bound of which his fellow visitor stood quite unconscious, only looking at Nanda still with the same coldness of wonder. All expression had for the minute been arrested in Mr. Longdon, but he at last began to show that it had merely been retarded. Yet it was almost with solemnity that he put forth his hand. "How do you do? How do you do? I'm so glad!"

Nanda shook hands with him as if she had done so already, though it might have been just her look of curiosity that detracted from her air of amusing herself. "Mother has wanted me awfully to see you. She told me to give you her love," she said. Then she added with odd irrelevance: "I didn't come in the carriage, nor in a cab nor an omnibus."

"You came on a bicycle?" Mitchy enquired.

"No, I walked." She still spoke without a gleam. "Mother wants me to do everything."

"Even to walk!" Mitchy laughed. "Oh yes, we must in these times keep up our walking!" The ingenious observer just now suggested might even have detected in the still higher rise of this visitor's spirits a want of mere inward ease.

She had taken no notice of the effect upon him of her mention of her mother, and she took none, visibly, of Mr. Longdon's manner or of his words. What she did while the two men, without offering her, either, a seat, practically lost themselves in their deepening vision, was to give her attention all to the place, looking at the books, pictures and other significant objects, and especially at the small table set out for tea, to which the servant who had admitted her now returned with a steaming kettle. "Isn't it charming here? Will there be any one else? Where IS Mr. Van? Shall I make tea?" There was just a faint quaver, showing a command of the situation more desired perhaps than achieved, in the very rapid sequence of these ejaculations. The servant meanwhile had placed the hot water above the little silver lamp and left the room.

"Do you suppose there's anything the matter? Oughtn't the man—or do you know our host's room?" Mr. Longdon, addressing Mitchy with solicitude, yet began to show in a countenance less blank a return of his sense of relations. It was as if something had happened to him and he were in haste to convert the signs of it into an appearance of care for the proprieties.

"Oh," said Mitchy, "Van's only making himself beautiful"—which account of their absent entertainer gained a point from his appearance at the moment in the doorway furthest removed from the place where the three were gathered.

Vanderbank came in with friendly haste and with something of the look indeed—refreshed, almost rosy, brightly brushed and quickly buttoned—of emerging, out of breath, from pleasant ablutions and renewals. "What a brute to have kept you waiting! I came back from work quite begrimed. How d'ye do, how d'ye do, how d'ye do? What's the matter with you, huddled there as if you were on a street-crossing? I want you to think this a refuge—but not of that kind!" he laughed. "Sit down, for heaven's sake; lie down—be happy! Of course you've made acquaintance all—except that Mitchy's so modest! Tea, tea!"—and he bustled to the table, where the next minute he appeared rather helpless. "Nanda, you blessed child, do YOU mind making it? How jolly of you!—are you all right?" He seemed, with this, for the first time, to be aware of somebody's absence. "Your mother isn't coming? She let you come alone? How jolly of her!" Pulling off her gloves Nanda had come immediately to his assistance; on which, quitting the table and laying hands on Mr. Longdon's shoulder to push him toward a sofa, he continued to talk, to sound a note of which the humour was the exaggeration of his flurry. "How jolly of you to be willing to come—most awfully kind! I hope she isn't ill? Do, Mitchy, lie down. Down, Mitchy, down!—that's the only way to keep you." He had waited for no account of Mrs. Brookenham's health, and it might have been apparent—still to our sharp spectator—that he found nothing wonderful in her daughter's unsupported arrival.

"I can make tea beautifully," she said from behind her table. "Mother showed me how this morning."

"This morning?"—and Mitchy, who, before the fire and still erect, had declined to be laid low, greeted the simple remark with uproarious mirth. "Dear young lady, you're the most delicious family!"

"She showed me at breakfast about the little things to do. She thought I might have to make it here and told me to offer," the girl went on. "I haven't yet done it this way at home—I usually have my tea upstairs. They bring it up in a cup, all made and very weak, with a piece of bread-and-butter in the saucer. That's because I'm so young. Tishy never lets me touch hers either; so we had to make up for lost time. That's what mother said"—she followed up her story, and her young distinctness had clearly something to do with a certain pale concentration in Mr. Longdon's face. "Mother isn't ill, but she told me already yesterday she wouldn't come. She said it's really all for ME. I'm sure I hope it is!"—with which there flickered in her eyes, dimly but perhaps all the more prettily, the first intimation they had given of the light of laughter. "She told me you'd understand, Mr. Van—from something you've said to her. It's for my seeing Mr. Longdon without—she thinks—her spoiling it."

"Oh my dear child, 'spoiling it'!" Vanderbank protested as he took a cup of tea from her to carry to their friend. "When did your mother ever spoil anything? I told her Mr. Longdon wanted to see you, but I didn't say anything of his not yearning also for the rest of the family."

A sound of protest rather formless escaped from the gentleman named, but Nanda continued to carry out her duty. "She told me to ask why he hadn't been again to see her. Mr. Mitchy, sugar?—isn't that the way to say it? Three lumps? You're like me, only that I more often take five." Mitchy had dashed forward for his tea; she gave it to him; then she added with her eyes on Mr. Longdon's, which she had had no difficulty in catching: "She told me to ask you all sorts of things."

This acquaintance had got up to take his cup from Vanderbank, whose hand, however, dealt with him on the question of his sitting down again. Mr. Longdon, resisting, kept erect with a low gasp that his host only was near enough to catch. This suddenly appeared to confirm an impression gathered by Vanderbank in their contact, a strange sense that his visitor was so agitated as to be trembling in every limb. It brought to his own lips a kind of ejaculation—"I SAY!" But even as he spoke Mr. Longdon's face, still white, but with a smile that was not all pain, seemed to supplicate him not to notice; and he was not a man to require more than this to achieve a divination as deep as it was rapid. "Why we've all been scattered for Easter, haven't we?" he asked of Nanda. "Mr. Longdon has been at home, your mother and father have been paying visits, I myself have been out of London, Mitchy has been to Paris, and you—oh yes, I know where you've been."

"Ah we all know that—there has been such a row made about it!" Mitchy said.

"Yes, I've heard of the feeling there is," Nanda replied.

"It's supposed to be awful, my knowing Tishy—quite too awful."

Mr. Longdon, with Vanderbank's covert aid, had begun to appear to have pulled himself together, dropping back on his sofa and attending in a manner to his tea. It might have been with the notion of showing himself at ease that he turned, on this, a benevolent smile to the girl. "But what, my dear, is the objection—?"

She looked gravely from him to Vanderbank and to Mitchy, and then back again from one of these to the other. "Do you think I ought to say?"

They both laughed and they both just appeared uncertain, but Vanderbank spoke first. "I don't imagine, Nanda, that you really know."

"No—as a family, you're perfection!" Mitchy broke out. Before the fire again, with his cup, he addressed his hilarity to Mr. Longdon. "I told you a tremendous lot, didn't I? But I didn't tell you about that."

His elder maintained, yet with a certain vagueness, the attitude of amiable enquiry. "About the—a—family?"

"Well," Mitchy smiled, "about its ramifications. This young lady has a tremendous friendship—and in short it's all very complicated."

"My dear Nanda," said Vanderbank, "it's all very simple. Don't believe a word of anything of the sort."

He had spoken as with the intention of a large vague optimism; but there was plainly something in the girl that would always make for lucidity. "Do you mean about Carrie Donner? I DON'T believe it, and at any rate I don't think it's any one's business. I shouldn't have a very high opinion of a person who would give up a friend." She stopped short with the sense apparent that she was saying more than she meant, though, strangely, as if it had been an effect of her type and of her voice, there was neither pertness nor passion in the profession she had just made. Curiously wanting as she seemed both in timidity and in levity, she was to a certainty not self-conscious—she was extraordinarily simple. Mr. Longdon looked at her now with an evident surrender to his extreme interest, and it might well have perplexed him to see her at once so downright as from experience and yet of so fresh and sweet a tenderness of youth.

"That's right, that's right, my dear young lady: never, never give up a friend for anything any one says!" It was Mitchy who rang out with this lively wisdom, the action of which on Mr. Longdon—unless indeed it was the action of something else—was to make that personage, in a manner that held the others watching him in slight suspense, suddenly spring to his feet again, put down his teacup carefully on a table near and then without a word, as if no one had been present, quietly wander away and disappear through the door left open on Vanderbank's entrance. It opened into a second, a smaller sitting-room, into which the eyes of his companions followed him.

"What's the matter?" Nanda asked. "Has he been taken ill?"

"He IS 'rum,' my dear Van," Mitchy said; "but you're right—of a charm, a distinction! In short just the sort of thing we want."

"The sort of thing we 'want'—I dare say!" Vanderbank laughed. "But it's not the sort of thing that's to be had for the asking—it's a sort we shall be mighty lucky if we can get!"

Mitchy turned with amusement to Nanda. "Van has invented him and, with the natural greed of the inventor, won't let us have him cheap. Well," he went on, "I'll 'stand' my share."

"The difficulty is that he's so much too good for us," Vanderbank explained.

"Ungrateful wretch," his friend cried, "that's just what I've been telling him that YOU are! Let the return you make not be to deprive me—!"

"Mr. Van's not at all too good for ME, if you mean that," Nanda broke in. She had finished her tea-making and leaned back in her chair with her hands folded on the edge of the tray.

Vanderbank only smiled at her in silence, but Mitchy took it up. "There's nobody too good for you, of course; only you're not quite, don't you know? IN our set. You're in Mrs. Grendon's. I know what you're going to say—that she hasn't got any set, that she's just a loose little white flower dropped on the indifferent bosom of the world. But you're the small sprig of tender green that, added to her, makes her immediately 'compose.'"

Nanda looked at him with her cold kindness. "What nonsense you do talk!"

"Your tone's sweet to me," he returned, "as showing that you don't think ME, either, too good for you. No one, remember, will take that for your excuse when the world some day sees me annihilated by your having put an end to our so harmless relations."

The girl appeared to lose herself a moment in the—abysmal humanity over which his fairly fascinating ugliness played like the whirl of an eddy. "Martyr!" she gently exclaimed. But there was no smile with it. She turned to Vanderbank, who, during the previous minute, had moved toward the neighbouring room, then faltering, taking counsel of discretion, had come back on a scruple. "What IS the matter?"

"What do you want to get out of him, you wretch?" Mitchy went on as their host for an instant said nothing.

Vanderbank, whose handsome face had a fine thought in it, looked a trifle absently from one of them to the other; but it was to Nanda he spoke. "Do you like him, Nanda?"

She showed surprise at the question. "How can I know so soon?"

"HE knows already."

Mitchy, with his eyes on her, became radiant to interpret. "He knows that he's pierced to the heart!"

"The matter with him, as you call it," Vanderbank brought out, "is one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen." He looked at her as with a hope she'd understand. "Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful!"

"Precisely," Mitchy continued; "the victim done for by one glance of the goddess!"

Nanda, motionless in her chair, fixed her other friend with clear curiosity. "'Beautiful'? Why beautiful?"

Vanderbank, about to speak, checked himself.

"I won't spoil it. Have it from HIM!"—and, returning to their friend, he this time went out.

Mitchy and Nanda looked at each other. "But isn't it rather awful?" Mitchy demanded.

She got up without answering; she slowly came away from the table. "I think I do know if I like him."

"Well you may," Mitchy exclaimed, "after his putting before you probably, on the whole, the greatest of your triumphs."

"And I also know, I think, Mr. Mitchy, that I like YOU." She spoke without attention to this hyperbole.

"In spite of my ineffectual attempts to be brilliant? That's a joy," he went on, "if it's not drawn out by the mere clumsiness of my flattery." She had turned away from him, kindly enough, as if time for his talk in the air were always to be allowed him: she took in vaguely Vanderbank's books and prints. "Why didn't your mother come?" Mitchy then enquired.

At this she again looked at him. "Do you mention her as a way of alluding to something you guess she must have told me?"

"That I've always supposed I make your flesh creep? Yes," Mitchy admitted; "I see she must have said to you: 'Be nice to him, to show him it isn't quite so bad as that!' So you ARE nice—so you always WILL be nice. But I adore you, all the same, without illusions."

She had opened at one of the tables, unperceivingly, a big volume of which she turned the leaves. "Don't 'adore' a girl, Mr. Mitchy—just help her. That's more to the purpose."

"Help you?" he cried. "You bring tears to my eyes!"

"Can't a girl have friends?" she went on. "I never heard of anything so idiotic." Giving him, however, no chance to take her up on this, she made a quick transition. "Mother didn't come because she wants me now, as she says, more to share her own life."

Mitchy looked at it. "But is this the way for her to share yours?"

"Ah that's another matter—about which you must talk to HER. She wants me no longer to keep seeing only with her eyes. She's throwing me into the world."

Mitchy had listened with the liveliest interest, but he presently broke into a laugh. "What a good thing then that I'm there to catch you!"

Without—it might have been seen—having gathered the smallest impression of what they enclosed, she carefully drew together again the covers of her folio. There was deliberation in her movements. "I shall always be glad when you're there. But where do you suppose they've gone?" Her eyes were on what was visible of the other room, from which there arrived no sound of voices.

"They're off there," said Mitchy, "but just looking unutterable things about you. The impression's too deep. Let them look, and tell me meanwhile if Mrs. Donner gave you my message."

"Oh yes, she told me some humbug."

"The humbug then was in the tone my perfectly sincere speech took from herself. She gives things, I recognise, rather that sound. It's her weakness," he continued, "and perhaps even one may say her danger. All the more reason you should help her, as I believe you're supposed to be doing, aren't you? I hope you feel you are," he earnestly added.

He had spoken this time gravely enough, and with magnificent gravity Nanda replied. "I HAVE helped her. Tishy's sure I have. That's what Tishy wants me for. She says that to be with some nice girl's really the best thing for her."

Poor Mitchy's face hereupon would have been interesting, would have been distinctly touching to other eyes; but Nanda's were not heedful of it. "Oh," he returned after an instant and without profane mirth, "that seems to me the best thing for any one."

Vanderbank, however, might have caught his expression, for Vanderbank now reappeared, smiling on the pair as if struck by their intimacy. "How you ARE keeping it up!" Then to Nanda persuasively: "Do you mind going to him in there? I want him so really to see you. It's quite, you know, what he came for."

Nanda seemed to wonder. "What will he do to me? Anything dreadful?"

"He'll tell you what I meant just now."

"Oh," said Nanda, "if he's a person who can tell me sometimes what you mean—!" With which she went quickly off.

"And can't I hear?" Mitchy asked of his host while they looked after her.

"Yes, but only from me." Vanderbank had pushed him to a seat again and was casting about for cigarettes. "Be quiet and smoke, and I'll tell you."

Mitchy, on the sofa, received with meditation a light. "Will she understand? She has everything in the world but one," he added. "But that's half."

Vanderbank, before him, lighted for himself. "What is it?"

"A sense of humour."

"Oh yes, she's serious."

Mitchy smoked a little. "She's tragic."

His friend, at the fire, watched a moment the empty portion of the other room, then walked across to give the door a light push that all but closed it. "It's rather odd," he remarked as he came back—"that's quite what I just said to him. But he won't treat her to comedy."



III

"Is it the shock of the resemblance to her grandmother?" Vanderbank had asked of Mr. Longdon on rejoining him in his retreat. This victim of memory, with his back turned, was gazing out of the window, and when in answer he showed his face there were tears in his eyes. His answer in fact was just these tears, the significance of which Vanderbank immediately recognised. "It's still greater then than you gathered from her photograph?"

"It's the most extraordinary thing in the world. I'm too absurd to be so upset"—Mr. Longdon smiled through his tears—"but if you had known Lady Julia you'd understand. It's SHE again, as I first knew her, to the life; and not only in feature, in stature, in colour, in movement, but in every bodily mark and sign, in every look of the eyes above all—oh to a degree!—in the sound, in the charm of the voice." He spoke low and confidentially, but with an intensity that now relieved him—he was as restless as with a discovery. He moved about as with a sacred awe—he might a few steps away have been in the very presence. "She's ALL Lady Julia. There isn't a touch of her mother. It's unique—an absolute revival. I see nothing of her father, I see nothing of any one else. Isn't it thought wonderful by every one?" he went on. "Why didn't you tell me?"

"To have prepared you a little?"—Vanderbank felt almost guilty. "I see—I should have liked to make more of it; though," he added all lucidly, "I might so, by putting you on your guard, have caused myself to lose what, if you'll allow me to say it, strikes me as one of the most touching tributes I've ever seen rendered to a woman. In fact, however, how could I know? I never saw Lady Julia, and you had in advance all the evidence I could have: the portrait—pretty bad, in the taste of the time, I admit—and the three or four photographs you must have noticed with it at Mrs. Brook's. These things must have compared themselves for you with my photograph in there of the granddaughter. The similarity of course we had all observed, but it has taken your wonderful memory and your happy vision to put into it all the detail."

Mr. Longdon thought a moment, giving a dab with his pocket-handkerchief. "Very true—you're quite right. It's far beyond any identity in the pictures. But why did you tell me," he added more sharply, "that she isn't beautiful?"

"You've deprived me," Vanderbank laughed, "of the power of expressing civilly any surprise at your finding her so. But I said to you, please remember, nothing that qualified a jot my sense of the special stamp of her face. I've always positively found in it a recall of the type of the period you must be thinking of. It isn't a bit modern. It's a face of Sir Thomas Lawrence—"

"It's a face of Gainsborough!" Mr. Longdon returned with spirit. "Lady Julia herself harked back."

Vanderbank, clearly, was equally touched and amused. "Let us say at once that it's a face of Raphael."

His old friend's hand was instantly on his arm. "That's exactly what I often said to myself of Lady Julia's."

"The forehead's a little too high," said Vanderbank.

"But it's just that excess that, with the exquisite eyes and the particular disposition round it of the fair hair, makes the individual grace, makes the beauty of the resemblance."

Released by Lady Julia's lover, the young man in turn grasped him as an encouragement to confidence. "It's a face that should have the long side-ringlets of 1830. It should have the rest of the personal arrangement, the pelisse, the shape of bonnet, the sprigged muslin dress and the cross-laced sandals. It should have arrived in a pea-green 'tilbury' and be a reader of Mrs. Radcliffe. And all this to complete the Raphael!"

Mr. Longdon, who, his discovery proclaimed, had begun, as might have been said, to live with it, looked hard a moment at his companion. "How you've observed her!"

Vanderbank met it without confusion. "Whom haven't I observed? Do you like her?" he then rather oddly and abruptly asked.

The old man broke away again. "How can I tell—with such disparities?"

"The manner must be different," Vanderbank suggested. "And the things she says."

His visitor was before him again. "I don't know what to make of them. They don't go with the rest of her. Lady Julia," said Mr. Longdon, "was rather shy."

On this too his host could meet him. "She must have been. And Nanda—yes, certainly—doesn't give that impression."

"On the contrary. But Lady Julia was gay!" he added with an eagerness that made Vanderbank smile.

"I can also see that. Nanda doesn't joke. And yet," Vanderbank continued with his exemplary candour, "we mustn't speak of her, must we? as if she were bold and grim."

Mr. Longdon fixed him. "Do you think she's sad?"

They had preserved their lowered tone and might, with their heads together, have been conferring as the party "out" in some game with the couple in the other room. "Yes. Sad." But Vanderbank broke off. "I'll send her to you." Thus it was he had come back to her.

Nanda, on joining the elder man, went straight to the point. "He says it's so beautiful—what you feel on seeing me: if that IS what he meant." Mr. Longdon kept silent again at first, only smiling at her, but less strangely now, and then appeared to look about him for some place where she could sit near him. There was a sofa in this room too, on which, observing it, she quickly sank down, so that they were presently together, placed a little sideways and face to face. She had shown perhaps that she supposed him to have wished to take her hand, but he forbore to touch her, though letting her feel all the kindness of his eyes and their long backward vision. These things she evidently felt soon enough; she went on before he had spoken. "I know how well you knew my grandmother. Mother has told me—and I'm so glad. She told me to say to you that she wants YOU to tell me." Just a shade, at this, might have appeared to drop over his face, but who was there to know if the girl observed it? It didn't prevent at any rate her completing her statement. "That's why she wished me to-day to come alone. She said she wished you to have me all to yourself."

No, decidedly, she wasn't shy: that mute reflexion was in the air an instant. "That, no doubt, is the best way. I thank her very much. I called, after having had the honour of dining—I called, I think, three times," he went on with a sudden displacement of the question; "but I had the misfortune each time to miss her."

She kept looking at him with her crude young clearness. "I didn't know about that. Mother thinks she's more at home than almost any one. She does it on purpose: she knows what it is," Nanda pursued with her perfect gravity, "for people to be disappointed of finding her."

"Oh I shall find her yet," said Mr. Longdon. "And then I hope I shall also find YOU."

She appeared simply to consider the possibility and after an instant to think well of it. "I dare say you will now, for now I shall be down."

Her companion just blinked. "In the drawing-room, you mean—always?"

It was quite what she meant. "Always. I shall see all the people who come. It will be a great thing for me. I want to hear all the talk. Mr. Mitchett says I ought to—that it helps to form the young mind. I hoped, for that reason," she went on with the directness that made her honesty almost violent—"I hoped there would be more people here to-day."

"I'm very glad there are not!"—the old man rang equally clear. "Mr. Vanderbank kindly arranged the matter for me just this way. I met him at dinner, at your mother's, three weeks ago, and he brought me home here that night, when, as knowing you so differently, we took the liberty of talking you all over. It naturally had the effect of making me want to begin with you afresh—only that seemed difficult too without further help. This he good-naturedly offered me; he said"—and Mr. Longdon recovered his spirits to repeat it—"'Hang it, I'll have 'em here for you!'"

"I see—he knew we'd come." Then she caught herself up. "But we haven't come, have we?"

"Oh it's all right—it's all right. To me the occasion's brilliant and the affluence great. I've had such talk with those young men—"

"I see"—she was again prompt, but beyond any young person he had ever met she might have struck him as literal. "You're not used to such talk. Neither am I. It's rather wonderful, isn't it? They're thought awfully clever, Mr. Van and Mr. Mitchy. Do you like them?" she pushed on.

Mr. Longdon, who, as compared with her, might have struck a spectator as infernally subtle, took an instant to think. "I've never met Mr. Mitchett before."

"Well, he always thinks one doesn't like him," Nanda explained. "But one does. One ought to," she added.

Her companion had another pause. "He likes YOU."

Oh Mr. Longdon needn't have hesitated! "I know he does. He has told mother. He has told lots of people."

"He has told even you," Mr. Longdon smiled.

"Yes—but that isn't the same. I don't think he's a bit dreadful," she pursued. Still, there was a greater interest. "Do you like Mr. Van?"

This time her interlocutor indeed hung fire. "How can I tell? He dazzles me."

"But don't you like that?" Then before he could really say: "You're afraid he may be false?"

At this he fairly laughed. "You go to the point!" She just coloured to have amused him so, but he quickly went on: "I think one has a little natural nervousness at being carried off one's feet. I'm afraid I've always liked too much to see where I'm going."

"And you don't with him?" She spoke with her curious hard interest. "I understand. But I think I like to be dazzled."

"Oh you've got time—you can come round again; you've a margin for accidents, for disappointments and recoveries: you can take one thing with another. But I've only my last little scrap."

"And you want to make no mistakes—I see."

"Well, I'm too easily upset."

"Ah so am I," said Nanda. "I assure you that in spite of what you say I want to make no mistakes either. I've seen a great many—though you mightn't think it," she persisted; "I really know what they may be. Do you like ME?" she brought forth. But even on this she spared him too; a look appeared to have been enough for her. "How can you say, of course, already?—if you can't say for Mr. Van. I mean as you've seen him so much. When he asked me just now if I liked YOU I told him it was too soon. But it isn't now; you see it goes fast. I DO like you." She gave him no time to acknowledge this tribute, but—as if it were a matter of course—tried him quickly with something else. "Can you say if you like mother?"

He could meet it pretty well now. "There are immense reasons why I should."

"Yes—I know about them, as I mentioned: mother has told me." But what she had to put to him kept up his surprise. "Have reasons anything to do with it? I don't believe you like her!" she exclaimed. "SHE doesn't think so," she added.

The old man's face at last, partly bewildered, partly reassured, showed something finer still in the effect she produced. "Into what mysteries you plunge!"

"Oh we do; that's what every one says of us. We discuss everything and every one—we're always discussing each other. I think we must be rather celebrated for it, and it's a kind of trick—isn't it?—that's catching. But don't you think it's the most interesting sort of talk? Mother says we haven't any prejudices. YOU have, probably, quantities—and beautiful ones: so perhaps I oughtn't to tell you. But you'll find out for yourself."

"Yes—I'm rather slow; but I generally end by finding out. And I've got, thank heaven," said Mr. Longdon, "quite prejudices enough."

"Then I hope you'll tell me some of them," Nanda replied in a tone evidently marking how much he pleased her.

"Ah you must do as I do—you must find out for yourself. Your resemblance to your grandmother is quite prodigious," he immediately added.

"That's what I wish you'd tell me about—your recollection of her and your wonderful feeling about her. Mother has told me things, but that I should have something straight from you is exactly what she also wants. My grandmother must have been awfully nice," the girl rambled on, "and I somehow don't see myself at all as the same sort of person."

"Oh I don't say you're in the least the same sort: all I allude to," Mr. Longdon returned, "is the miracle of the physical heredity. Nothing could be less like her than your manner and your talk."

Nanda looked at him with all her honesty. "They're not so good, you must think."

He hung fire an instant, but was as honest as she. "You're separated from her by a gulf—and not only of time. Personally, you see, you breathe a different air."

She thought—she quite took it in. "Of course. And you breathe the same—the same old one, I mean, as my grandmother."

"The same old one," Mr. Longdon smiled, "as much as possible. Some day I'll tell you more of what you're curious of. I can't go into it now."

"Because I've upset you so?" Nanda frankly asked.

"That's one of the reasons."

"I think I can see another too," she observed after a moment. "You're not sure how much I shall understand. But I shall understand," she went on, "more, perhaps, than you think. In fact," she said earnestly, "I PROMISE to understand. I've some imagination. Had my grandmother?" she asked. Her actual sequences were not rapid, but she had already anticipated him. "I've thought of that before, because I put the same question to mother."

"And what did your mother say?"

"'Imagination—dear mamma? Not a grain!'"

The old man showed a faint flush. "Your mother then has a supply that makes up for it."

The girl fixed him on this with a deeper attention. "You don't like her having said that."

His colour came stronger, though a slightly strained smile did what it could to diffuse coolness. "I don't care a single scrap, my dear, in respect to the friend I'm speaking of, for any judgement but my own."

"Not even for her daughter's?"

"Not even for her daughter's." Mr. Longdon had not spoken loud, but he rang as clear as a bell.

Nanda, for admiration of it, broke almost for the first time into the semblance of a smile. "You feel as if my grandmother were quite YOUR property!"

"Oh quite."

"I say—that's splendid!"

"I'm glad you like it," he answered kindly.

The very kindness pulled her up. "Pardon my speaking so, but I'm sure you know what I mean. You mustn't think," she eagerly continued, "that mother won't also want to hear you."

"On the subject of Lady Julia?" He gently, but very effectively, shook his head. "Your mother shall never hear me."

Nanda appeared to wonder at it an instant, and it made her completely grave again. "It will be all for ME?"

"Whatever there may be of it, my dear."

"Oh I shall get it all out of you," she returned without hesitation. Her mixture of free familiarity and of the vividness of evocation of something, whatever it was, sharply opposed—the little worry of this contradiction, not altogether unpleasant, continued to fill his consciousness more discernibly than anything else. It was really reflected in his quick brown eyes that she alternately drew him on and warned him off, but also that what they were beginning more and more to make out was an emotion of her own trembling there beneath her tension. His glimpse of it widened—his glimpse of it fairly triumphed when suddenly, after this last declaration, she threw off with quite the same accent but quite another effect: "I'm glad to be like any one the thought of whom makes you so good! You ARE good," she continued; "I see already how I shall feel it." She stared at him with tears, the sight of which brought his own straight back; so that thus for a moment they sat there together.

"My dear child!" he at last simply murmured. But he laid his hand on her now, and her own immediately met it.

"You'll get used to me," she said with the same gentleness that the response of her touch had tried to express; "and I shall be so careful with you that—well, you'll see!" She broke short off with a quaver and the next instant she turned—there was some one at the door. Vanderbank, still not quite at his ease, had come back to smile upon them. Detaching herself from Mr. Longdon she got straight up to meet him. "You were right, Mr. Van. It's beautiful, beautiful, beautiful!"



BOOK FOURTH. MR. CASHMORE

Harold Brookenham, whom Mr. Cashmore, ushered in and announced, had found in the act of helping himself to a cup of tea at the table apparently just prepared—Harold Brookenham arrived at the point with a dash so direct as to leave the visitor an option between but two suppositions: that of a desperate plunge, to have his shame soon over, or that of the acquired habit of such appeals, which had taught him the easiest way. There was no great sharpness in the face of Mr. Cashmore, who was somehow massive without majesty; yet he mightn't have been proof against the suspicion that his young friend's embarrassment was an easy precaution, a conscious corrective to the danger of audacity. It wouldn't have been impossible to divine that if Harold shut his eyes and jumped it was mainly for the appearance of doing so. Experience was to be taken as showing that one might get a five-pound note as one got a light for a cigarette; but one had to check the friendly impulse to ask for it in the same way. Mr. Cashmore had in fact looked surprised, yet not on the whole so surprised as the young man seemed to have expected of him. There was almost a quiet grace in the combination of promptitude and diffidence with which Harold took over the responsibility of all proprietorship of the crisp morsel of paper that he slipped with slow firmness into the pocket of his waistcoat, rubbing it gently in its passage against the delicately buff-coloured duck of which that garment was composed. "So quite too awfully kind of you that I really don't know what to say"—there was a marked recall, in the manner of this speech, of the sweetness of his mother's droop and the tenderness of her wail. It was as if he had been moved for the moment to moralise, but the eyes he raised to his benefactor had the oddest effect of marking that personage himself as a theme for the moralist.

Mr. Cashmore, who would have been very red-haired if he had not been very bald, showed a single eye-glass and a long upper lip; he was large and jaunty, with little petulant movements and intense ejaculations that were not in the line of his type. "You may say anything you like if you don't say you'll repay it. That's always nonsense—I hate it."

Harold remained sad, but showed himself really superior. "Then I won't say it." Pensively, a minute, he appeared to figure the words, in their absurdity, on the lips of some young man not, like himself, tactful. "I know just what you mean."

"But I think, you know, that you ought to tell your father," Mr. Cashmore said.

"Tell him I've borrowed of you?"

Mr. Cashmore good-humouredly demurred. "It would serve me right—it's so wretched my having listened to you. Tell him, certainly," he went on after an instant. "But what I mean is that if you're in such straits you should speak to him like a man."

Harold smiled at the innocence of a friend who could suppose him not to have exhausted that resource. "I'm ALWAYS speaking to him like a man, and that's just what puts him so awfully out. He denies to my face that I AM one. One would suppose, to hear him, not only that I'm a small objectionable child, but that I'm scarcely even human. He doesn't conceive me as with human wants."

"Oh," Mr. Cashmore laughed, "you've all—you youngsters—as many wants, I know, as an advertisement page of the Times."

Harold showed an admiration. "That's awfully good. If you think you ought to speak of it," he continued, "do it rather to mamma." He noted the hour. "I'll go, if you'll excuse me, to give you the chance."

The visitor referred to his own watch. "It's your mother herself who gives the chances—the chances YOU take."

Harold looked kind and simple. "She HAS come in, I know. She'll be with you in a moment."

He was halfway to the door, but Mr. Cashmore, though so easy, had not done with him. "I suppose you mean that if it's only your mother who's told, you may depend on her to shield you."

Harold turned this over as if it were a questionable sovereign, but on second thoughts he wonderfully smiled. "Do you think that after you've let me have it you can tell? You could, of course, if you hadn't." He appeared to work it out for Mr. Cashmore's benefit. "But I don't mind," he added, "your telling mamma."

"Don't mind, you mean really, its annoying her so awfully?"

The invitation to repent thrown off in this could only strike the young man as absurd—it was so previous to any enjoyment. Harold liked things in their proper order; but at the same time his evolutions were quick. "I dare say I AM selfish, but what I was thinking was that the terrific wigging, don't you know?—well, I'd take it from HER. She knows about one's life—about our having to go on, by no fault of our own, as our parents start us. She knows all about wants—no one has more than mamma."

Mr. Cashmore soundlessly glared his amusement. "So she'll say it's all right?"

"Oh no; she'll let me have it hot. But she'll recognise that at such a pass more must be done for a fellow, and that may lead to something—indirectly, don't you see? for she won't TELL my father, she'll only, in her own way, work on him—that will put me on a better footing and for which therefore at bottom I shall have to thank YOU!"

The eye assisted by Mr. Cashmore's glass had with a discernible growth of something like alarm fixed during this address the subject of his beneficence. The thread of their relations somehow lost itself in the subtler twist, and he fell back on mere stature, position and property, things always convenient in the presence of crookedness. "I shall say nothing to your mother, but I think I shall be rather glad you're not a son of mine."

Harold wondered at this new element in their talk. "Do your sons never—?"

"Borrow money of their mother's visitors?" Mr. Cashmore had taken him up, eager, evidently, quite to satisfy him; but the question was caught on the wing by Mrs. Brookenham herself, who had opened the door as her friend spoke and who quickly advanced with an echo of it.

"Lady Fanny's visitors?"—and, though her eyes rather avoided than met his own, she seemed to cover her ladyship's husband with a vague but practised sympathy. "What on earth are you saying to Harold about them?" Thus it was that at the end of a few minutes Mr. Cashmore, on the sofa face to face with her, found his consciousness quite purged of its actual sense of his weakness and a new turn given to the idea of what, in one's very drawing-room, might go on behind one's back. Harold had quickly vanished—had been tacitly disposed of, and Mrs. Brook's caller had moved even in the short space of time so far in another direction as to have drawn from her the little cold question: "'Presents'? You don't mean money?"

He clearly felt the importance of expressing at least by his silence and his eye-glass what he meant. "Her extravagance is beyond everything, and though there are bills enough, God knows, that do come in to me, I don't see how she pulls through unless there are others that go elsewhere."

Mrs. Brookenham had given him his tea—her own she had placed on a small table near her; and she could now respond freely to the impulse felt, on this, of settling herself to something of real interest. Except to Harold she was incapable of reproach, though there were of course shades in her resignation, and her daughter's report of her to Mr. Longdon as conscious of an absence of prejudice would have been justified for a spectator by the particular feeling that Mr. Cashmore's speech caused her to disclose. What did this feeling wonderfully appear unless strangely irrelevant? "I've no patience when I hear you talk as if you weren't horribly rich."

He looked at her an instant as if guessing she might have derived that impression from Harold. "What has that to do with it? Does a rich man enjoy any more than a poor his wife's making a fool of him?"

Her eyes opened wider: it was one of her very few ways of betraying amusement. There was little indeed to be amused at here except his choice of the particular invidious name. "You know I don't believe a word you say."

Mr. Cashmore drank his tea, then rose to carry the cup somewhere and put it down, declining with a motion any assistance. When he was on the sofa again he resumed their intimate talk. "I like tremendously to be with you, but you mustn't think I've come here to let you say to me such dreadful things as that." He was an odd compound, Mr. Cashmore, and the air of personal good health, the untarnished bloom which sometimes lent a monstrous serenity to his mention of the barely mentionable, was on occasion balanced or matched by his playful application of extravagant terms to matters of much less moment. "You know what I come to you for, Mrs. Brook: I won't come any more if you're going to be horrid and impossible."

"You come to me, I suppose, because—for my deep misfortune, I assure you—I've a kind of vision of things, of the wretched miseries in which you all knot yourselves up, which you yourselves are as little blessed with as if, tumbling about together in your heap, you were a litter of blind kittens."

"Awfully good that—you do lift the burden of my trouble!" He had laughed out in the manner of the man who made notes for platform use of things that might serve; but the next moment he was grave again, as if his observation had reminded him of Harold's praise of his wit. It was in this spirit that he abruptly brought out: "Where, by the way, is your daughter?"

"I haven't the least idea. I do all I can to enter into her life, but you can't get into a railway train while it's on the rush."

Mr. Cashmore swung back to hilarity. "You give me lots of things. Do you mean she's so 'fast'?" He could keep the ball going.

Mrs. Brookenham obliged him with what she meant. "No; she's a tremendous dear, and we're great friends. But she has her free young life, which, by that law of our time that I'm sure I only want, like all other laws, once I know what they ARE, to accept—she has her precious freshness of feeling which I say to myself that, so far as control is concerned, I ought to respect. I try to get her to sit with me, and she does so a little, because she's kind. But before I know it she leaves me again: she feels what a difference her presence makes in one's liberty of talk."

Mr. Cashmore was struck by this picture. "That's awfully charming of her."

"Isn't it too dear?" The thought of it, for Mrs. Brook, seemed fairly to open out vistas. "The modern daughter!"

"But not the ancient mother!" Mr. Cashmore smiled.

She shook her head with a world of accepted woe. "'Give me back, give me back one hour of my youth'! Oh I haven't a single thrill left to answer a compliment. I sit here now face to face with things as they are. They come in their turn, I assure you—and they find me," Mrs. Brook sighed, "ready. Nanda has stepped on the stage and I give her up the house. Besides," she went on musingly, "it's awfully interesting. It IS the modern daughter—we're really 'doing' her, the child and I; and as the modern has always been my own note—I've gone in, I mean, frankly for my very own Time—who is one, after all, that one should pretend to decline to go where it may lead?" Mr. Cashmore was unprepared with an answer to this question, and his hostess continued in a different tone: "It's sweet her sparing one!"

This, for the visitor, was firmer ground. "Do you mean about talking before her?"

Mrs. Brook's assent was positively tender. "She won't have a difference in my freedom. It's as if the dear thing KNEW, don't you see? what we must keep back. She wants us not to have to think. It's quite maternal!" she mused again. Then as if with the pleasure of presenting it to him afresh: "That's the modern daughter!"

"Well," said Mr. Cashmore, "I can't help wishing she were a trifle less considerate. In that case I might find her with you, and I may tell you frankly that I get more from her than I do from you. She has the great merit for me, in the first place, of not being such an admirer of my wife."

Mrs. Brookenham took this up with interest. "No—you're right; she doesn't, as I do, SEE Lady Fanny, and that's a kind of mercy."

"There you are then, you inconsistent creature," he cried with a laugh: "after all you DO believe me! You recognise how benighted it would be for your daughter not to feel that Fanny's bad."

"You're too tiresome, my dear man," Mrs. Brook returned, "with your ridiculous simplifications. Fanny's NOT 'bad'; she's magnificently good—in the sense of being generous and simple and true, too adorably unaffected and without the least mesquinerie. She's a great calm silver statue."

Mr. Cashmore showed, on this, something of the strength that comes from the practice of public debate. "Then why are you glad your daughter doesn't like her?"

Mrs. Brook smiled as with the sadness of having too much to triumph. "Because I'm not, like Fanny, without mesquinerie. I'm not generous and simple. I'm exaggeratedly anxious about Nanda. I care, in spite of myself, for what people may say. Your wife doesn't—she towers above them. I can be a shade less brave through the chance of my girl's not happening to feel her as the rest of us do."

Mr. Cashmore too heavily followed. "To 'feel' her?"

Mrs. Brook floated over. "There would be in that case perhaps something to hint to her not to shriek on the house-tops. When you say," she continued, "that one admits, as regards Fanny, anything wrong, you pervert dreadfully what one does freely grant—that she's a great glorious pagan. It's a real relief to know such a type—it's like a flash of insight into history. None the less if you ask me why then it isn't all right for young things to 'shriek' as I say, I have my answer perfectly ready." After which, as her visitor seemed not only too reduced to doubt it, but too baffled to distinguish audibly, for his credit, between resignation and admiration, she produced: "Because she's purely instinctive. Her instincts are splendid—but it's terrific."

"That's all I ever maintained it to be!" Mr. Cashmore cried. "It IS terrific."

"Well," his friend answered, "I'm watching her. We're all watching her. It's like some great natural poetic thing—an Alpine sunrise or a big high tide."

"You're amazing!" Mr. Cashmore laughed. "I'm watching her too."

"And I'm also watching YOU!" Mrs. Brook lucidly continued. "What I don't for a moment believe is that her bills are paid by any one. It's MUCH more probable," she sagaciously observed, "that they're not paid at all."

"Oh well, if she can get on that way—!"

"There can't be a place in London," Mrs. Brook pursued, "where they're not delighted to dress such a woman. She shows things, don't you see? as some fine tourist region shows the placards in the fields and the posters on the rocks. And what proof can you adduce?" she asked.

Mr. Cashmore had grown restless; he picked a stray thread off the knee of his trousers. "Ah when you talk about 'adducing'—!" He appeared to intimate—as with the hint that if she didn't take care she might bore him—that it was the kind of word he used only in the House of Commons.

"When I talk about it you can't meet me," she placidly returned. But she fixed him with her weary penetration. "You try to believe what you CAN'T believe, in order to give yourself excuses. And she does the same—only less, for she recognises less in general the need of them. She's so grand and simple."

Poor Mr. Cashmore stared. "Grander and simpler than I, you mean?"

Mrs. Brookenham thought. "Not simpler—no; but very much grander. She wouldn't, in the case you conceive, recognise really the need of WHAT you conceive."

Mr. Cashmore wondered—it was almost mystic. "I don't understand you."

Mrs. Brook, seeing it all from dim depths, tracked it further and further. "We've talked her over so!"

Mr. Cashmore groaned as if too conscious of it. "Indeed we have!"

"I mean WE"—and it was wonderful how her accent discriminated. "We've talked you too—but of course we talk to every one." She had a pause through which there glimmered a ray from luminous hours, the inner intimacy which, privileged as he was, he couldn't pretend to share; then she broke out almost impatiently: "We're looking after her—leave her to US!"

His envy of this nearer approach to what so touched him than he could himself achieve was in his face, but he tried to throw it off. "I doubt if after all you're good for her."

But Mrs. Brookenham knew. "She's just the sort of person we ARE good for, and the thing for her is to be with us as much as possible—just live with us naturally and easily, listen to our talk, feel our confidence in her, be kept up, don't you know? by the sense of what we expect of her splendid type, and so, little by little, let our influence act. What I meant to say just now is that I do perfectly see her taking what you call presents."

"Well then," Mr. Cashmore enquired, "what do you want more?"

Mrs. Brook hung fire an instant—she seemed on the point of telling him. "I DON'T see her, as I said, recognising the obligation."

"The obligation—?"

"To give anything back. Anything at all." Mrs. Brook was positive. "The comprehension of petty calculations? Never!"

"I don't say the calculations are petty," Mr. Cashmore objected.

"Well, she's a great creature. If she does fall—!" His hostess lost herself in the view, which was at last all before her. "Be sure we shall all know it."

"That's exactly what I'm afraid of!"

"Then don't be afraid till we do. She would fall, as it were, on US, don't you see? and," said Mrs. Brook, with decision this time in her headshake, "that couldn't be. We MUST keep her up—that's your guarantee. It's rather too much," she added with the same increase of briskness, "to have to keep YOU up too. Be very sure that if Carrie really wavers—"

"Carrie?"

His interruption was clearly too vague to be sincere, and it was as such that, going straight on, she treated it. "I shall never again give her three minutes' attention. To answer to you for Fanny without being able—"

"To answer to Fanny for me, do you mean?" He had flushed quickly as if he awaited her there. "It wouldn't suit you, you contend? Well then, I hope it will ease you off," he went on with spirit, "to know that I wholly LOATHE Mrs. Donner."

Mrs. Brook, staring, met the announcement with an absolute change of colour. "And since when, pray?" It was as if a fabric had crumbled. "She was here but the other day, and as full of you, poor thing, as an egg of meat."

Mr. Cashmore could only blush for her. "I don't say she wasn't. My life's a burden from her."

Nothing, for a spectator, could have been so odd as Mrs. Brook's disappointment unless it had been her determination. "Have you done with her already?"

"One has never done with a buzzing insect—!"

"Until one has literally killed it?" Mrs. Brookenham wailed. "I can't take that from you, my dear man: it was yourself who originally distilled the poison that courses through her veins." He jumped up at this as if he couldn't bear it, presenting as he walked across the room, however, a large foolish fugitive back on which her eyes rested as on a proof of her penetration. "If you spoil everything by trying to deceive me, how can I help you?"

He had looked, in his restlessness, at a picture or two, but he finally turned round. "With whom is it you talk us over? With Petherton and his friend Mitchy? With your adored Vanderbank? With your awful Duchess?"

"You know my little circle, and you've not always despised it." She met him on his return with a figure that had visibly flashed out for her. "Don't foul your own nest! Remember that after all we've more or less produced you." She had a smile that attenuated a little her image, for there were things that on a second thought he appeared ready to take from her. She patted the sofa as if to invite him again to be seated, and though he still stood before her it was with a face that seemed to show how her touch went home. "You know I've never quite thought you do us full honour, but it was because SHE took you for one of us that Carrie first—"

At this, to stop her, he dropped straight into the seat. "I assure you there has really been nothing." With a continuation of his fidget he pulled out his watch. "Won't she come in at all?"

"Do you mean Nanda?"

"Talk me over with HER!" he smiled, "if you like. If you don't believe Mrs. Donner is dust and ashes to me," he continued, "you do little justice to your daughter."

"Do you wish to break it to me that you're in love with Nanda?"

He hesitated, but only as if to give weight to his reply. "Awfully. I can't tell you how I like her."

She wondered. "And pray how will THAT help me? Help me, I mean, to help you. Is it what I'm to tell your wife?"

He sat looking away, but he evidently had his idea, which he at last produced. "Why wouldn't it be just the thing? It would exactly prove my purity."

There might have been in her momentary silence a hint of acceptance of it as a practical contribution to their problem, and there were indeed several lights in which it could be considered. Mrs. Brook, on a quick survey, selected the ironic. "I see, I see. I might by the same law arrange somehow that Lady Fanny should find herself in love with Edward. That would 'prove' HER purity. And you could be quite at ease," she laughed—"he wouldn't make any presents!"

Mr. Cashmore regarded her with a candour that was almost a reproach to her mirth. "I like your daughter better than I like you."

But it only amused her more. "Is that perhaps because I don't prove your purity?"

What he might have replied remained in the air, for the door opened so exactly at the moment she spoke that he rose again with a start and the butler, coming in, received her enquiry full in the face. This functionary's answer to it, however, had no more than the usual austerity. "Mr. Vanderbank and Mr. Longdon."

These visitors took a minute to appear, and Mrs. Brook, not stirring—still only looking from the sofa calmly up at Mr. Cashmore—used the time, it might have seemed, for correcting any impression of undue levity made by her recent question. "Where did you last meet Nanda?"

He glanced at the door to see if he were heard. "At the Grendons'."

"So you do go there?"

"I went over from Hicks the other day for an hour."

"And Carrie was there?"

"Yes. It was a dreadful horrid bore. But I talked only to your daughter."

She got up—the others were at hand—and offered Mr. Cashmore an expression that might have struck him as strange. "It's serious."

"Serious?"—he had no eyes for the others.

"She didn't tell me."

He gave a sound, controlled by discretion, which sufficed none the less to make Mr. Longdon—beholding him for the first time—receive it with a little of the stiffness of a person greeted with a guffaw. Mr. Cashmore visibly liked this silence of Nanda's about their meeting.



II

Mrs. Brookenham, who had introduced him to the elder of her visitors, had also found in serving these gentlemen with tea, a chance to edge at him with an intensity not to be resisted: "Talk to Mr. Longdon—take him off THERE." She had indicated the sofa at the opposite end of the room and had set him an example by possessing herself, in the place she already occupied, of her "adored" Vanderbank. This arrangement, however, constituted for her, in her own corner, as soon as she had made it, the ground of an appeal. "Will he hate me any worse for doing that?"

Vanderbank glanced at the others. "Will Cashmore, do you mean?"

"Dear no—I don't care whom HE hates. But with Mr. Longdon I want to avoid mistakes."

"Then don't try quite so hard!" Vanderbank laughed. "Is that your reason for throwing him into Cashmore's arms?"

"Yes, precisely—so that I shall have these few moments to ask you for directions: you must know him by this time so well. I only want, heaven help me, to be as nice to him as I possibly can."

"That's quite the best thing for you and altogether why, this afternoon, I brought him: he might have better luck in finding you—it was he who suggested it—than he has had by himself. I'm in a general way," Vanderbank added, "watching over him."

"I see—and he's watching over you." Mrs. Brook's sweet vacancy had already taken in so much. "He wants to judge of what I may be doing to you—he wants to save you from me. He quite detests me."

Vanderbank, with the interest as well as the amusement, fairly threw himself back. "There's nobody like you—you're too magnificent!"

"I AM; and that I can look the truth in the face and not be angry or silly about it is, as you know, the one thing in the world for which I think a bit well of myself."

"Oh yes, I know—I know; you're too wonderful!"

Mrs. Brookenham, in a brief pause, completed her covert consciousness. "They're doing beautifully—he's taking Cashmore with a seriousness!"

"And with what is Cashmore taking him?"

"With the hope that from one moment to another Nanda may come in."

"But how on earth does that concern him?"

"Through an extraordinary fancy he has suddenly taken to her." Mrs. Brook had been swift to master the facts. "He has been meeting her at Tishy's, and she has talked to him so effectually about his behaviour that she has quite made him cease to care for Carrie. He prefers HER now—and of course she's much nicer."

Vanderbank's attention, it was clear, had now been fully seized. "She's much nicer. Rather! What you mean is," he asked the next moment, "that Nanda, this afternoon, has been the object of his call?"

"Yes—really; though he tried to keep it from me. She makes him feel," she went on, "so innocent and good."

Her companion for a moment said nothing; but then at last: "And WILL she come in?"

"I haven't the least idea."

"Don't you know where she is?"

"I suppose she's with Tishy, who has returned to town."

Vanderbank turned this over. "Is that your system now—to ask no questions?"

"Why SHOULD I ask any—when I want her life to be as much as possible like my own? It's simply that the hour has struck, as you know. From the moment she IS down the only thing for us is to live as friends. I think it's so vulgar," Mrs. Brook sighed, "not to have the same good manners with one's children as one has with other people. She asks ME nothing."

"Nothing?" Vanderbank echoed.

"Nothing."

He paused again; after which, "It's very disgusting!" he declared. Then while she took it up as he had taken her word of a moment before, "It's very preposterous," he continued.

Mrs. Brook appeared at a loss. "Do you mean her helping him?"

"It's not of Nanda I'm speaking—it's of him." Vanderbank spoke with a certain impatience. "His being with her in any sort of direct relation at all. His mixing her up with his other beastly affairs."

Mrs. Brook looked intelligent and wan about it, but also perfectly good-humoured. "My dear man, he and his affairs ARE such twaddle!"

Vanderbank laughed in spite of himself. "And does that make it any better?"

Mrs. Brook thought, but presently had a light—she almost smiled with it. "For US!" Then more woefully, "Don't you want Carrie to be saved?" she asked.

"Why should I? Not a jot. Carrie be hanged!"

"But it's for Fanny," Mrs. Brook protested. "If Carrie IS rescued it's a pretext the less for Fanny." As the young man looked for an instant rather gloomily vague she softly quavered: "I suppose you don't positively WANT Fanny to bolt?"

"To bolt?"

"Surely I've not to remind you at this time of day how Captain Dent-Douglas is always round the corner with the post-chaise, and how tight, on our side, we're all clutching her."

"But why not let her go?"

Mrs. Brook, at this, showed real resentment. "'Go'? Then what would become of us?" She recalled his wandering fancy. "She's the delight of our life."

"Oh!" Vanderbank sceptically murmured.

"She's the ornament of our circle," his companion insisted. "She will, she won't—she won't, she will! It's the excitement, every day, of plucking the daisy over." Vanderbank's attention, as she spoke, had attached itself across the room to Mr. Longdon; it gave her thus an image of the way his imagination had just seemed to her to stray, and she saw a reason in it moreover for her coming up in another place.

"Isn't he rather rich?" She allowed the question all its effect of abruptness.

Vanderbank looked round at her. "Mr. Longdon? I haven't the least idea."

"Not after becoming so intimate? It's usually, with people, the very first thing I get my impression of." There came into her face for another glance at their friend no crudity of curiosity, but an expression more tenderly wistful. "He must have some mysterious box under his bed."

"Down in Suffolk?—a miser's hoard? Who knows? I dare say," Vanderbank went on. "He isn't a miser, but he strikes me as careful."

Mrs. Brook meanwhile had thought it out. "Then he has something to be careful of; it would take something really handsome to inspire in a man like him that sort of interest. With his small expenses all these years his savings must be immense. And how could he have proposed to mamma unless he had originally had money?"

If Vanderbank a little helplessly wondered he also laughed. "You must remember your mother refused him."