"Well, I hope you won't think me very vulgar," said Mrs. Brook, "if I
tell you that I want you still more to have some idea of what you'll get
by it. I've no wish," she added, "to keep on boring you with Mitchy--"

"Don't, don't!" Nanda pleaded.

Her mother stopped as short as if there had been something in her tone
to set the limit the more utterly for being unstudied. Yet poor Mrs.
Brook couldn't leave it there. "Then what do you get instead?"

"Instead of Mitchy? Oh," said Nanda, "I shall never marry."

Mrs. Brook at this turned away, moving over to the window with quickened
weariness. Nanda, on her side, as if their talk had ended, went across
to the sofa to take up her parasol before leaving the room, an impulse
rather favoured than arrested by the arrival of her brother Harold, who
came in at the moment both his relatives had turned a back to the door
and who gave his sister, as she faced him, a greeting that made their
mother look round. "Hallo, Nan--you ARE lovely! Ain't she lovely,
mother?"

"No!" Mrs. Brook answered, not, however, otherwise noticing him. Her
domestic despair centred at this instant all in her daughter. "Well
then, we shall consider--your father and I--that he must take the
consequence."

Nanda had now her hand on the door, while Harold had dropped on the
sofa. "'He'?" she just sounded.

"I mean Mr. Longdon."

"And what do you mean by the consequence?"

"Well, it will do for the beginning of it that you'll please go down
WITH him."

"On Saturday then? Thanks, mamma," the girl returned.

She was instantly gone, on which Mrs. Brook had more attention for her
son. This, after an instant, as she approached the sofa and raised her
eyes from the little table beside it, came straight out. "Where in the
world is that five-pound note?"

Harold looked vacantly about him. "What five-pound note?"

BOOK SEVENTH. MITCHY

Mr. Longdon's garden took in three acres and, full of charming features,
had for its greatest wonder the extent and colour of its old brick wall,
in which the pink and purple surface was the fruit of the mild ages
and the protective function, for a visitor strolling, sitting, talking,
reading, that of a nurse of reverie. The air of the place, in the August
time, thrilled all the while with the bliss of birds, the hum of little
lives unseen and the flicker of white butterflies. It was on the large
flat enclosed lawn that Nanda spoke to Vanderbank of the three weeks sh