" said Mrs. Brook. "Little Aggie, to whom plenty of pearls were
singularly becoming, met it as pleasant sympathy. Yes, and it was a REAL
pull. But of course," she continued with the prettiest humour and as if
Mrs. Brook would quite understand, "from the moment one has a person's
nails, and almost his teeth, in one's flesh--!"

Mrs. Brook's sympathy passed, however, with no great ease from Aggie's
pearls to her other charms; fixing the former indeed so markedly that
Harold had a quick word about it for Lady Fanny. "When poor mummy
thinks, you know, that Nanda might have had them--!"

Lady Fanny's attention, for that matter, had resisted them as little.
"Well, I dare say that if I had wanted _I_ might!"

"Lord--COULD you have stood him?" the young man returned. "But I
believe women can stand anything!" he profoundly concluded. His mother
meanwhile, recovering herself, had begun to ejaculate on the prints
in Aggie's arms, and he was then diverted from the sense of what he
"personally," as he would have said, couldn't have stood, by a glance at
Lord Petherton's trophy, for which he made a prompt grab. "The bone of
contention?" Lord Petherton had let it go and Harold remained arrested
by the cover. "Why blest if it hasn't Van's name!"

"Van's?"--his mother was near enough to effect her own snatch, after
which she swiftly faced the proprietor of the volume. "Dear man, it's
the last thing you lent me! But I don't think," she added, turning to
Tishy, "that I ever passed such a production on to YOU."

"It was just seeing Mr. Van's hand," Aggie conscientiously explained,
"that made me think one was free--!"

"But it isn't Mr. Van's hand!"--Mrs. Brook quite smiled at the error.
She thrust the book straight at Mr. Longdon. "IS that Mr. Van's hand?"

Holding the disputed object, which he had put on his nippers to glance
at, he presently, without speaking, looked over these aids straight at
Nanda, who looked as straight back at him. "It was I who wrote Mr. Van's
name." The girl's eyes were on Mr. Longdon, but her words as for the
company. "I brought the book here from Buckingham Crescent and left it
by accident in the other room."

"By accident, my dear," her mother replied, "I do quite hope. But what
on earth did you bring it for? It's too hideous."

Nanda seemed to wonder. "Is it?" she murmured.

"Then you haven't read it?"

She just hesitated. "One hardly knows now, I think, what is and what
isn't."

"She brought it