His companion, again a little bewildered, watched him; then with
impatience: "Do, please, tell me what has happened."

He quickly pulled himself round. "Well, he was, after a long absence,
here a while since as if expressly to see her. But after spending half
an hour he went away without it."

Mr. Longdon's watch continued. "He spent the half-hour with her mother
instead?"

"Oh 'instead'--it was hardly that. He at all events dropped his idea."

"And what had it been, his idea?"

"You speak as if he had as many as I!" Mitchy replied. "In a manner
indeed he has," he continued as if for himself. "But they're of a
different kind," he said to Mr. Longdon.

"What had it been, his idea?" the old man, however, simply repeated.

Mitchy's confession at this seemed to explain his previous evasion. "We
shall never know."

Mr. Longdon hesitated. "He won't tell YOU?"

"Me?" Mitchy had a pause. "Less than any one."

Many things they had not spoken had already passed between them, and
something evidently, to the sense of each, passed during the moment that
followed this. "While you were abroad," Mr. Longdon presently asked,
"did you hear from him?"

"Never. And I wrote nothing."

"Like me," said Mr. Longdon. "I've neither written nor heard."

"Ah but with you it will be different." Mr. Longdon, as if with the
outbreak of an agitation hitherto controlled, had turned abruptly away
and, with the usual swing of his glass, begun almost wildly to wander.
"You WILL hear."

"I shall be curious."

"Oh but what Nanda wants, you know, is that you shouldn't be too much
so."

Mr. Longdon thoughtfully rambled. "Too much--?"

"To let him off, as we were saying, easily."

The elder man for a while said nothing more, but he at last came back.
"She'd like me actually to give him something?"

"I dare say!"

"Money?"

Mitchy smiled. "A handsome present." They were face to face again
with more mute interchange. "She doesn't want HIM to have lost--!"
Mr. Longdon, however, on this, once more broke off while Mitchy's
eyes followed him. "Doesn't it give a sort of measure of what she may
feel--?"

He had paused, working it out again with the effect of his friend's
returning afresh to be fed with his light. "Doesn't what give it?"

"Why the fact that we still like him."

Mr. Longdon stared. "Do YOU still like him?"

"If I didn't how should I mind--?" But on the utterance of it Mitchy
fairly pulled up.

His companion, after