dy else to trust."

"Yes." Mitchy's concurrence was grave. "Only you and me."

"Only you and me."

The eyes of the two men met over it in a pause terminated at last by
Mitchy's saying: "We must make it all up to her."

"Is that your idea?"

"Ah," said Mitchy gently, "don't laugh at it."

His friend's grey gloom again covered him. "But what CAN--?" Then as
Mitchy showed a face that seemed to wince with a silent "What COULD?"
the old man completed his objection. "Think of the magnitude of the
loss."

"Oh I don't for a moment suggest," Mitchy hastened to reply, "that it
isn't immense."

"She does care for him, you know," said Mr. Longdon.

Mitchy, at this, gave a wide, prolonged glare. "'Know'--?" he ever so
delicately murmured.

His irony had quite touched. "But of course you know! You know
everything--Nanda and you."

There was a tone in it that moved a spring, and Mitchy laughed out. "I
like your putting me with her! But we're all together. With Nanda," he
next added, "it IS deep."

His companion took it from him. "Deep."

"And yet somehow it isn't abject."

The old man wondered. "'Abject'?"

"I mean it isn't pitiful. In its way," Mitchy developed, "it's happy."

This too, though rather ruefully, Mr. Longdon could take from him.
"Yes--in its way."

"Any passion so great, so complete," Mitchy went on, "is--satisfied or
unsatisfied--a life." Mr. Longdon looked so interested that his fellow
visitor, evidently stirred by what was now an appeal and a dependence,
grew still more bland, or at least more assured, for affirmation. "She's
not TOO sorry for herself."

"Ah she's so proud!"

"Yes, but that's a help."

"Oh--not for US!"

It arrested Mitchy, but his ingenuity could only rebound. "In ONE
way: that of reducing us to feel that the desire to 'make up' to her
is--well, mainly for OUR relief. If she 'trusts' us, as I said just now,
it isn't for THAT she does so." As his friend appeared to wait then to
hear, it was presently with positive joy that he showed he could meet
the last difficulty. "What she trusts us to do"--oh Mitchy had worked it
out!--"is to let HIM off."

"Let him off?" It still left Mr. Longdon dim.

"Easily. That's all."

"But what would letting him off hard be? It seems to me he's--on any
terms--already beyond us. He IS off."

Mr. Longdon had given it a sound that suddenly made Mitchy appear to
collapse under a sharper sense of the matter. "He IS off," he moodily
echoed.