hat."

Nanda, without heeding the remark, took in the sunshine. "It will be
charming now in the garden."

Her friend got up, found his wonderful crossbarred cap, after a glance,
on a neighbouring chair, and with it came toward her. "Your hope is
that--as I'm good enough to be worth it--she'll save ME."

Nanda looked at him now. "She will, Mitchy--she WILL!"

They stood a moment in the recovered brightness; after which he
mechanically--as with the pressure of quite another consciousness--put
on his cap. "Well then, shall that hope between us be the thing--?"

"The thing?"--she just wondered.

"Why that will have drawn us together--to hold us so, you know--this
afternoon. I mean the secret we spoke of."

She put out to him on this the hand he had taken a few minutes before,
and he clasped it now only with the firmness it seemed to give and to
ask for. "Oh it will do for that!" she said as they went out together.

III

It had been understood that he was to take his leave on the morrow,
though Vanderbank was to stay another day. Mr. Longdon had for the
Sunday dinner invited three or four of his neighbours to "meet" the two
gentlemen from town, so that it was not till the company had departed,
or in other words till near bedtime, that our four friends could again
have become aware, as between themselves, of that directness of mutual
relation which forms the subject of our picture. It had not, however,
prevented Nanda's slipping upstairs as soon as the doctor and his wife
had gone, and the manner indeed in which, on the stroke of eleven, Mr.
Longdon conformed to his tradition of appropriating a particular candle
was as positive an expression of it as any other. Nothing in him
was more amiable than the terms maintained between the rigour of his
personal habits and his free imagination of the habits of others. He
deprecated as regards the former, it might have been seen, most signs of
likeness, and no one had ever dared to learn how he would have handled
a show of imitation. "The way to flatter him," Mitchy threw off five
minutes later, "is not to make him think you resemble or agree with him,
but to let him see how different you perceive he can bear to think you.
I mean of course without hating you."

"But what interest have YOU," Vanderbank asked, "in the way to flatter
him?"

"My dear fellow, more interest than you. I haven't been here all day
without arriving at conclusions on the credit he has opened to yo