for the time nothing to
contribute, even when Mitchy, rising with the words he had last uttered
from the chair in which he had been placed, took sociably as well, on
the hearth-rug, a position before their hostess. This move ministered
apparently to Vanderbank's mere silence, for it was still without
speaking that, after a little, he turned away from his friend and
dropped once more into the same seat. "I've shown you already, you of
course remember," Vanderbank presently said to him, "that I'm perfectly
aware of how much better Mrs. Brook would like YOU for the position."

"He thinks I want him myself," Mrs. Brook blandly explained.

She was indeed, as they always thought her, "wonderful," but she was
perhaps not even now so much so as Mitchy found himself able to be. "But
how would you lose old Van--even at the worst?" he earnestly asked of
her.

She just hesitated. "What do you mean by the worst?"

"Then even at the best," Mitchy smiled. "In the event of his falsifying
your prediction; which, by the way, has the danger, hasn't it?--I mean
for your intellectual credit--of making him, as we all used to be called
by our nursemaids, 'contrairy.'"

"Oh I've thought of that," Mrs. Brook returned. "But he won't do, on the
whole, even for the sweetness of spiting me, what he won't want to do.
_I_ haven't said I should lose him," she went on; "that's only the view
he himself takes--or, to do him perfect justice, the idea he candidly
imputes to me; though without, I imagine--for I don't go so far as
that--attributing to me anything so unutterably bete as a feeling of
jealousy."

"You wouldn't dream of my supposing anything inept of you," Vanderbank
said on this, "if you understood to the full how I keep on admiring you.
Only what stupefies me a little," he continued, "is the extraordinary
critical freedom--or we may call it if we like the high intellectual
detachment--with which we discuss a question touching you, dear
Mrs. Brook, so nearly and engaging so your private and most sacred
sentiments. What are we playing with, after all, but the idea of Nanda's
happiness?"

"Oh I'm not playing!" Mrs. Brook declared with a little rattle of
emotion.

"She's not playing"--Mr. Mitchett gravely confirmed it. "Don't you
feel in the very air the vibration of the passion that she's simply too
charming to shake at the window as the housemaid shakes the tablecloth
or the jingo the flag?" Then he took up what Vanderbank had previous