imple. We mustn't see TOO
tremendous things--even in each other." She quite lost patience with the
danger she glanced at. "We CAN be simple!"

"We CAN, by God!" Mitchy laughed.

"Well, we are now--and it's a great comfort to have it settled," said
Vanderbank.

"Then you see," Mrs. Brook returned, "what a mistake you'd make to see
abysses of subtlety in my having been merely natural."

"We CAN be natural," Mitchy declared.

"We can, by God!" Vanderbank laughed.

Mrs. Brook had turned to Mitchy. "I just wanted you to know. So I spoke.
It's not more complicated than that. As for WHY I wanted you to know--!"

"What better reason could there be," Mitchy interrupted, "than your
being filled to the finger-tips with the sense of how I would want it
myself, and of the misery, the absolute pathos, of my being left out?
Fancy, my dear chap"--he had only to put it to Van--"my NOT knowing!".

Vanderbank evidently couldn't fancy it, but he said quietly enough: "I
should have told you myself."

"Well, what's the difference?"

"Oh there IS a difference," Mrs. Brook loyally said. Then she opened
an inch or two, for Vanderbank, the door of her dim radiance. "Only
I should have thought it a difference for the better. Of course," she
added, "it remains absolutely with us three alone, and don't you already
feel from it the fresh charm--with it here between us--of our being
together?"

It was as if each of the men had waited for the other to assent better
than he himself could and Mitchy then, as Vanderbank failed, had
gracefully, to cover him, changed the subject. "But isn't Nanda, the
person most interested, to know?"

Vanderbank gave on this a strange sound of hilarity. "Ah that would
finish it off!"

It produced for a few seconds something like a chill, a chill that had
for consequence a momentary pause which in its turn added weight to the
words next uttered. "It's not I who shall tell her," Mrs. Brook said
gently and gravely. "There!--you may be sure. If you want a promise,
it's a promise. So that if Mr. Longdon's silent," she went on, "and you
are, Mitchy, and I am, how in the world shall she have a suspicion?"

"You mean of course except by Van's deciding to mention it himself."

Van might have been, from the way they looked at him, some beautiful
unconscious object; but Mrs. Brook was quite ready to answer. "Oh poor
man, HE'LL never breathe."

"I see. So there we are."

To this discussion the subject of it had