stretch
before me," he resumed after an interval during which clearly, in spite
of his movements, he had looked at nothing--"what does stretch before me
is the happy prospect of my feeling that I've found in you a friend
with whom, so utterly and unreservedly, I can always go to the bottom
of things. This luxury, you see now, of our freedom to look facts in the
face is one of which, I promise you, I mean fully to avail myself." He
stopped before her again, and again she was silent. "It's so awfully
jolly, isn't it? that there's not at last a single thing that we
can't take our ease about. I mean that we can't intelligibly name and
comfortably tackle. We've worked through the long tunnel of artificial
reserves and superstitious mysteries, and I at least shall have only to
feel that in showing every confidence and dotting every 'i' I follow the
example you so admirably set. You go down to the roots? Good. It's all I
ask!"

He had dropped into a chair as he talked, and so long as she remained
in her own they were confronted; but she presently got up and, the next
moment, while he kept his place, was busy restoring order to the objects
both her visitors had disarranged. "If you weren't delightful you'd be
dreadful!"

"There we are! I could easily, in other words, frighten you if I would."

She took no notice of the remark, only, after a few more scattered
touches, producing an observation of her own. "He's going, all the same,
Mr. Van, to be charming to mother. We've settled that."

"Ah then he CAN make time--?"

She judged it. "For as much as THAT, yes. For as much, I mean, as
may sufficiently show her that he hasn't given her up. So don't you
recognise how much more time YOU can make?"

"Ah--see precisely--there we are again!" Mitchy promptly ejaculated.

Yet he had gone, it seemed, further than she followed. "But where?"

"Why, as I say, at the roots and in the depths of things."

"Oh!" She dropped to an indifference that was but part of her general
patience for all his irony.

"It's needless to go into the question of not giving your mother up. One
simply DOESN'T give her up. One can't. There she is."

"That's exactly what HE says. There she is."

"Ah but I don't want to say nothing but what 'he' says!" Mitchy laughed.
"He can't at all events have mentioned to you any such link as the one
that in my case is now almost the most palpable. I'VE got a wife, you
know."

"Oh Mitchy!" the girl protestingly tho