will he--on account of your mother--also like ME?"

She weighed it. "No, Edward." She covered him with her loveliest
expression. "No, not really either. But it won't make any difference."
This time she had pulled him up.

"Not if he doesn't like Harold or like you or like me?" Edward clearly
found himself able to accept only the premise.

"He'll be perfectly loyal. It will be the advantage of mamma!" Mrs.
Brookenham cried. "Mamma, Edward," she brought out with a flash of
solemnity--"mamma WAS wonderful. There have been times when I've always
felt her still with us, but Mr. Longdon makes it somehow so real.
Whether she's with me or not, at any rate, she's with HIM; so that when
HE'S with me, don't you see--?"

"It comes to the same thing?" her husband intelligently asked. "I see.
And when was he with you last?"

"Not since the day he dined--but that was only last week. He'll come
soon--I know from Van."

"And what does Van know?"

"Oh all sorts of things. He has taken the greatest fancy to him."

"The old boy--to Van?"

"Van to Mr. Longdon. And the other way too. Mr. Longdon has been most
kind to him."

Brookenham still moved about. "Well, if he likes Van and doesn't like
US, what good will that do us?"

"You'd understand soon enough if you felt Van's loyalty."

"Oh the things you expect me to feel, my dear!" Edward Brookenham
lightly moaned.

"Well, it doesn't matter. But he IS as loyal to me as Mr. Longdon to
mamma."

The statement produced on his part an unusual vision of the comedy
of things. "Every Jenny has her Jockey!" Yet perhaps--remarkably
enough--there was even more imagination in his next words. "And what
sort of means?"

"Mr. Longdon? Oh very good. Mamma wouldn't have been the loser. Not that
she cared. He MUST like Nanda," Mrs. Brookenham wound up.

Her companion appeared to look at the idea and then meet it. "He'll have
to see her first."

"Oh he shall see her!" she rang out. "It's time for her at any rate to
sit downstairs."

"It was time, you know, _I_ thought, a year ago."

"Yes, I know what you thought. But it wasn't."

She had spoken with decision, but he seemed unwilling to concede the
point. "You allowed yourself she was all ready."

"SHE was all ready--yes. But I wasn't. I am now," Mrs. Brookenham, with
a fine emphasis on her adverb, proclaimed as she turned to meet
the opening of the door and the appearance of the butler, whose
announcement--"Lord Petherton and Mr. Mit