hy could show off-hand that he knew what it was. "It's a pledge,
quite as much, to you. He shows you the whole thing. He likes you not a
whit less than he likes her."

"Oh thunder!" Van impatiently sighed.

"It's as 'rum' as you please, but there it is," said the inexorable
Mitchy.

"Then does he think I'll do it for THIS?"

"For 'this'?"

"For the place, the whole thing, as you call it, that he shows me."

Mitchy had a short silence that might have represented a change of
colour. "It isn't good enough?" But he instantly took himself up. "Of
course he wants--as I do--to treat you with tact!"

"Oh it's all right," Vanderbank immediately said. "Your 'tact'--yours
and his--is marvellous, and Nanda's greatest of all."

Mitchy's momentary renewal of stillness was addressed, he somehow
managed not obscurely to convey, to the last clause of his friend's
speech. "If you're not sure," he presently resumed, "why can't you
frankly ask him?"

Vanderbank again, as the phrase is, "mooned" about a little. "Because I
don't know that it would do."

"What do you mean by 'do'?"

"Well, that it would be exactly--what do you call it?--'square.' Or even
quite delicate or decent. To take from him, in the way of an assurance
so handsomely offered, so much, and then to ask for more: I don't feel I
can do it. Besides, I've my little conviction. To the question itself he
might easily reply that it's none of my business."

"I see," Mitchy dropped. "Such pressure might suggest to him moreover
that you're hesitating more than you perhaps really are."

"Oh as to THAT" said Vanderbank, "I think he practically knows how
much."

"And how little?" He met this, however, with no more form than if it had
been a poor joke, so that Mitchy also smoked for a moment in silence.
"It's your coming down here, you mean, for these three or four days,
that will have fixed it?"

The question this time was one to which the speaker might have expected
an answer, but Vanderbank's only immediate answer was to walk and walk.
"I want so awfully to be kind to her," he at last said.

"I should think so!" Then with irrelevance Mitchy harked back. "Shall
_I_ find out?"

But Vanderbank, with another thought, had lost the thread. "Find out
what?"

"Why if she does get anything--!"

"If I'm not kind ENOUGH?"--Van had caught up again. "Dear no; I'd rather
you shouldn't speak unless first spoken to."

"Well, HE may speak--since he knows we know."

"It isn