ut he stared at the length of her
jump. "He might attempt to do so, but I shouldn't at all like it."
He was moved immediately to dismiss this branch of the subject
and, apparently to help himself, take up another. "Do you mean she
understands he has asked her down for a regular long stay?"

Mrs. Brook barely hesitated. "She understands, I think, that what I
expect of her is to make it as long as possible."

Vanderbank laughed out--as it was even after ten years still possible to
laugh--at the childlike innocence with which her voice could invest the
hardest teachings of life; then with something a trifle nervous in the
whole sound and manner he sprang up from his chair. "What a blessing he
is to us all!"

"Yes, but think what we must be to HIM."

"An immense interest, no doubt." He took a few aimless steps and,
stooping over a basket of flowers, inhaled it with violence, almost
buried his face. "I dare say we ARE interesting." He had spoken rather
vaguely, but Mrs. Brook knew exactly why. "We render him no end of a
service. We keep him in touch with old memories."

Vanderbank had reached one of the windows, shaded from without by a
great striped sun-blind beneath which and between the flower-pots of the
balcony he could see a stretch of hot relaxed street. He looked a minute
at these things. "I do so like your phrases!"

She had a pause that challenged his tone. "Do you call mamma a
'phrase'?"

He went off again, quite with extravagance, but quickly, leaving the
window, pulled himself up. "I dare say we MUST put things for him--he
does it, cares or is able to do it, so little himself."

"Precisely. He just quietly acts. That's his nature, dear thing. We must
LET him act."

Vanderbank seemed to stifle again too vivid a sense of her particular
emphasis. "Yes, yes--we must let him."

"Though it won't prevent Nanda, I imagine," his hostess pursued, "from
finding the fun of a whole month at Beccles--or whatever she puts
in--not exactly fast and furious."

Vanderbank had the look of measuring what the girl might "put in."
"The place will be quiet, of course, but when a person's so fond of a
person--!"

"As she is of him, you mean?"

He hesitated. "Yes. Then it's all right."

"She IS fond of him, thank God!" said Mrs. Brook.

He was before her now with the air of a man who had suddenly determined
on a great blind leap. "Do you know what he has done? He wants me so to
marry her that he has proposed a definit