"Mr. Longdon? Then that keeps up?"

"'That'?"--she was at a loss.

"I mean his intimacy--with Mitchy."

"So far as it IS an intimacy."

"But didn't you, by the way"--and he looked again at his watch--"tell me
they're just about to turn up together?"

"Oh not so very particularly together."

"Mitchy first alone?" Vanderbank asked.

She had a smile that was dim, that was slightly strange. "Unless you'll
stay for company."

"Thanks--impossible. And then Mr. Longdon alone?"

"Unless Mitchy stays."

He had another pause. "You haven't after all told me about the
'evolution'--or the evolutions--of his wife."

"How can I if you don't give me time?"

"I see--of course not." He seemed to feel for an instant the return of
his curiosity. "Yet it won't do, will it? to have her out before HIM?
No, I must go." He came back to her and at present she gave him a hand.
"But if you do see Mr. Longdon alone will you do me a service? I mean
indeed not simply today, but with all other good chances?"

She waited. "Any service whatever. But which first?"

"Well," he returned in a moment, "let us call it a bargain. I look after
your mother--"

"And I--?" She had had to wait again.

"Look after my good name. I mean for common decency to HIM. He has been
of a kindness to me that, when I think of my failure to return it,
makes me blush from head to foot. I've odiously neglected him--by a
complication of accidents. There are things I ought to have done that I
haven't. There's one in particular--but it doesn't matter. And I haven't
even explained about THAT. I've been a brute and I didn't mean it and
I couldn't help it. But there it is. Say a good word for me. Make out
somehow or other that I'm NOT a beast. In short," the young man said,
quite flushed once more with the intensity of his thought, "let us have
it that you may quite trust ME if you'll let me a little--just for my
character as a gentleman--trust YOU."

"Ah you may trust me," Nanda replied with her handshake.

"Good-bye then!" he called from the door.

"Good-bye," she said after he had closed it.

III

It was half-past five when Mitchy turned up; and her relapse had in the
mean time known no arrest but the arrival of tea, which, however, she
had left unnoticed. He expressed on entering the fear that he failed
of exactitude, to which she replied by the assurance that he was on
the contrary remarkably near it and by the mention of all the aid
to patience