et her
away--take her out of her aunt's life."

Mitchy met it all now in a sort of spellbound stillness. "What do you
know about her aunt's life?"

"Oh I know everything!" She spoke with her first faint shade of
impatience.

It produced for a little a hush between them, at the end of which her
companion said with extraordinary gentleness and tenderness: "Dear
old Nanda!" Her own silence appeared consciously to continue, and the
suggestion of it might have been that for intelligent ears there was
nothing to add to the declaration she had just made and which Mitchy
sat there taking in as with a new light. What he drew from it indeed
he presently went on to show. "You're too awfully interesting. Of
course--you know a lot. How shouldn't you--and why?"

"'Why'? Oh that's another affair! But you don't imagine what I know; I'm
sure it's much more than you've a notion of. That's the kind of thing
now one IS--just except the little marvel of Aggie. What on earth," the
girl pursued, "do you take us for?"

"Oh it's all right!" breathed Mitchy, divinely pacific.

"I'm sure I don't know whether it is; I shouldn't wonder if it were in
fact all wrong. But what at least is certainly right is for one not to
pretend anything else. There I am for you at any rate. Now the beauty of
Aggie is that she knows nothing--but absolutely, utterly: not the least
little tittle of anything."

It was barely visible that Mitchy hesitated, and he spoke quite gravely.
"Have you tried her?"

"Oh yes. And Tishy has." His gravity had been less than Nanda's.
"Nothing, nothing." The memory of some scene or some passage might have
come back to her with a charm. "Ah say what you will--it IS the way we
ought to be!"

Mitchy, after a minute of much intensity, had stopped watching her;
changing his posture and with his elbows on his knees he dropped for
a while his face into his hands. Then he jerked himself to his feet.
"There's something I wish awfully I could say to you. But I can't."

Nanda, after a slow headshake, covered him with one of the dimmest of
her smiles. "You needn't say it. I know perfectly which it is." She held
him an instant, after which she went on: "It's simply that you wish me
fully to understand that you're one who, in perfect sincerity, doesn't
mind one straw how awful--!"

"Yes, how awful?" He had kindled, as he paused, with his new eagerness.

"Well, one's knowledge may be. It doesn't shock in you a single
hereditary prejud