endence is ideal?"

Vanderbank, who appeared to have been timing himself, put up his watch.
"I'm bound to say then that with separations so established I understand
less than ever your unforgettable explosion."

"Ah you come back to that?" she wearily asked. "And you find it, with
all you've to think about, unforgettable?"

"Oh but there was a wild light in your eye--!"

"Well," Mrs. Brook said, "you see it now quite gone out." She had
spoken more sadly than sharply, but her impatience had the next moment a
flicker. "I called Nanda in because I wanted to."

"Precisely; but what I don't make out, you see, is what you've since
gained by it."

"You mean she only hates me the more?"

Van's impatience, in the movement with which he turned from her, had a
flare still sharper. "You know I'm incapable of meaning anything of the
sort."

She waited a minute while his back was presented. "I sometimes think in
effect that you're incapable of anything straightforward."

Vanderbank's movement had not been to the door, but he almost reached it
after giving her, on this, a hard look. He then stopped short, however,
to stare an instant still more fixedly into the hat he held in his hand;
the consequence of which in turn was that he the next minute stood again
before her chair. "Don't you call it straightforward of me just not to
have come for so long?"

She had again to take time to say. "Is that an allusion to what--by the
loss of your beautiful presence--I've failed to 'gain'? I dare say at
any rate"--she gave him no time to reply--"that you feel you're quite as
straightforward as I and that we're neither of us creatures of mere rash
impulse. There was a time in fact, wasn't there? when we rather enjoyed
each other's dim depths. If I wanted to fawn on you," she went on, "I
might say that, with such a comrade in obliquity to wind and double
about with, I'd risk losing myself in the mine. But why retort or
recriminate? Let us not, for God's sake, be vulgar--we haven't yet, bad
as it is, come to THAT. I CAN be, no doubt--I some day MUST be: I feel
it looming at me out of the awful future as an inevitable fate. But let
it be for when I'm old and horrible; not an hour before. I do want to
live a little even yet. So you ought to let me off easily--even as I let
you."

"Oh I know," said Vanderbank handsomely, "that there are things you
don't put to me! You show a tact!"

"There it is. And I like much better," Mrs. Brook went o