"You got every penny?"

"Every penny. But fancy your bringing it up!"

"Ah I always do, you know--SOME day."

"Yes, you're of a rigour--! But be at peace. Harold's quite square," he
went on, "and I quite meant to have asked you about him."

Mrs. Brook, promptly, was all for this. "Oh it's all right."

Mitchy came nearer. "Lady Fanny--?"

"Yes--HAS stayed for him."

"Ah," said Mitchy, "I knew you'd do it! But hush--they're coming!" On
which, while she whisked away, he went back to the fire.

IV

Ten minutes of talk with Mr. Longdon by Mrs. Brookenham's hearth elapsed
for him without his arriving at the right moment to take up the business
so richly put before him in his previous interview. No less time indeed
could have sufficed to bring him into closer relation with this affair,
and nothing at first could have been more marked than the earnestness
of his care not to show impatience of appeals that were, for a person of
his old friend's general style, simple recognitions and decencies. There
was a limit to the mere allusiveness with which, in Mr. Longdon's school
of manners, a foreign tour might be treated, and Mitchy, no doubt,
plentifully showed that none of his frequent returns had encountered a
curiosity at once so explicit and so discreet. To belong to a circle in
which most of the members might be at any moment on the other side of
the globe was inevitably to fall into the habit of few questions, as
well as into that of making up for their fewness by their freedom.
This interlocutor in short, while Mrs. Brook's representative
privately thought over all he had in hand, went at some length and very
charmingly--since it was but a tribute to common courtesy--into the
Virgilian associations of the Bay of Naples. Finally, however, he
started, his eye having turned to the clock. "I'm afraid that, though
our hostess doesn't appear, I mustn't forget myself. I too came back but
yesterday and I've an engagement--for which I'm already late--with Miss
Brookenham, who has been so good as to ask me to tea."

The divided mind, the express civility, the decent "Miss Brookenham,"
the escape from their hostess--these were all things Mitchy could
quickly take in, and they gave him in a moment his light for not missing
his occasion. "I see, I see--I shall make you keep Nanda waiting. But
there's something I shall ask you to take from me quite as a sufficient
basis for that: which is simply that after all, you know--for