ut the frill of her little umbrella, "I don't
suppose your idea of him is _quite_ that he should persuade you to live
with us."

"Dear no--not a bit." He spoke as not resenting either the fear or the
hope she imputed; met both imputations, in fact, with a sort of
intellectual relief. "I place the case for you wholly in your aunt's
hands. I take her view, with my eyes shut; I accept in all confidence
any man she selects. If he's good enough for _her_--elephantine snob as
she is--he's good enough for me; and quite in spite of the fact that
she'll be sure to select one who can be trusted to be nasty to me. My
only interest is in your doing what she wants. You shan't be so beastly
poor, my darling," Mr. Croy declared, "if I can help it."

"Well then, good-bye, papa," the girl said after a reflection on this
that had perceptibly ended for her in a renunciation of further debate.
"Of course you understand that it may be for long."

Her companion, hereupon, had one of his finest inspirations. "Why not,
frankly, for ever? You must do me the justice to see that I don't do
things, that I've never done them, by halves--that if I offer you to
efface myself, it's for the final, fatal sponge that I ask, well
saturated and well applied."

She turned her handsome, quiet face upon him at such length that it
might well have been for the last time. "I don't know what you're like."

"No more do I, my dear. I've spent my life in trying, in vain, to
discover. Like nothing--more's the pity. If there had been many of us,
and we could have found each other out, there's no knowing what we
mightn't have done. But it doesn't matter now. Good-bye, love." He
looked even not sure of what she would wish him to suppose on the
subject of a kiss, yet also not embarrassed by his uncertainty.

She forbore in fact for a moment longer to clear it up. "I wish there
were some one here who might serve--for any contingency--as a witness
that I _have_ put it to you that I'm ready to come."

"Would you like me," her father asked, "to call the landlady?"

"You may not believe me," she pursued, "but I came really hoping you
might have found some way. I'm very sorry, at all events, to leave you
unwell." He turned away from her, on this, and, as he had done before,
took refuge, by the window, in a stare at the street. "Let me put
it--unfortunately without a witness," she added after a moment, "that
there's only one word you really need speak."

When he took