at her with the fullest recognition that there
was something he was there to discuss with her, but with the assurance
in every soft sound of him that no height to which she might lift the
discussion would be too great for him to reach. His every cadence
and every motion was an implication, as from one to the other, of the
exquisite. Oh he could sustain it! "Well, I mean the establishment of
something between us. I mean your arranging somehow that we shall be
drawn more together--know together something nobody else knows. I should
like so terrifically to have a RELATION that is a secret, with you."

"Oh if that's all you want you can be easily gratified. Rien de plus
facile, as mamma says. I'm full of secrets--I think I'm really most
secretive. I'll share almost any one of them with you--if it's only a
good one."

Mitchy debated. "You mean you'll choose it yourself? You won't let it be
one of mine?"

Nanda wondered. "But what's the difference?"

Her companion jumped up again and for a moment pervaded the place. "When
you say such things as that, you're of a beauty--! MAY it," he asked as
he stopped before her, "be one of mine--a perfectly awful one?"

She showed her clearest interest. "As I suppose the most awful secrets
are the best--yes, certainly."

"I'm hideously tempted." But he hung fire; then dropping into his chair
again: "It would be too bad. I'm afraid I can't."

"Then why won't THIS do, just as it is?"

"'This'?" He looked over the big bland room. "Which?"

"Why what you're here for?"

"My dear child I'm here--most of all--to love you more than ever; and
there's an absence of favouring mystery about THAT--!" She looked at
him as if seeing what he meant and only asking to remedy it. "There's a
certain amount of mystery we can now MAKE--that it strikes me in fact we
MUST make. Dear Mitchy," she continued almost with eagerness, "I don't
think we CAN really tell."

He had fallen back in his chair, not looking at her now, and with his
hands, from his supported elbows, clasped to keep himself more quiet.
"Are you still talking about Aggie?"

"Why I've scarcely begun!"

"Oh!" It was not irritation he appeared to express, but the slight
strain of an effort to get into relation with the subject. Better to
focus the image he closed his eyes a while.

"You speak of something that may draw us together, and I simply reply
that if you don't feel how near together we are--in this I shouldn't
imagine you ev