he room with her and, on coming back, was full of it.
"She'll go, she'll go!"

"Go where?" Vanderbank appeared to have for the question less attention
than usual.

"Well, to the place her companion will propose. Probably--like Anna
Karenine--to one of the smaller Italian towns."

"Anna Karenine? She isn't a bit like Anna."

"Of course she isn't so clever," said Mrs. Brook. "But that would spoil
her. So it's all right."

"I'm glad it's all right," Vanderbank laughed. "But I dare say we shall
still have her with us a while."

"We shall do that, I trust, whatever happens. She'll come up
again--she'll remain, I feel, one of those enormous things that fate
seems somehow to have given me as the occupation of my odd moments. I
don't see," Mrs. Brook added, "what still keeps her on the edge, which
isn't an inch wide."

Vanderbank looked this time as if he only tried to wonder. "Isn't it
YOU?"

Mrs. Brook mused more deeply. "Sometimes I think so. But I don't know."

"Yes, how CAN you of course know, since she can't tell you?"

"Oh if I depended on her telling--!" Mrs. Brook shook out with this
a sofa-cushion or two and sank into the corner she had arranged. The
August afternoon was hot and the London air heavy; the room moreover,
though agreeably bedimmed, gave out the staleness of the season's end.
"If you hadn't come to-day," she went on, "you'd have missed me till I
don't know when, for we've let the Hovel again--wretchedly, but still
we've let it--and I go down on Friday to see that it isn't too filthy.
Edward, who's furious at what I've taken for it, had his idea that we
should go there this year ourselves."

"And now"--Vanderbank took her up--"that fond fancy has become simply
the ghost of a dead thought, a ghost that, in company with a thousand
predecessors, haunts the house in the twilight and pops at you out of
odd corners."

"Oh Edward's dead thoughts are indeed a cheerful company and worthy of
the perpetual mental mourning we seem to go about in. They're worse than
the relations we're always losing without seeming to have any fewer,
and I expect every day to hear that the Morning Post regrets to have
to announce in that line too some new bereavement. The apparitions
following the deaths of so many thoughts ARE particularly awful in the
twilight, so that at this season, while the day drags and drags, I'm
glad to have any one with me who may keep them at a distance."

Vanderbank had not sat down; slowly