e many days, as much as I promised
on coming up to you that afternoon when after my return to town I found
Mr. Mitchett instead of your mother awaiting me in the drawing-room."

"Yes," said Nanda, "you've really done quite as I asked you."

"Well," he returned, "I felt half an hour ago that, near as I was to
relief, I could keep it up no longer; so that though I knew it would
bring me much too soon I started at six sharp for our trysting-place."

"And I've no tea, after all, to reward you!" It was but now clearly that
she noticed it. "They must have removed the things without my heeding."

Her old friend looked at her with some intensity. "Were you in the
room?"

"Yes--but I didn't see the man come in."

"What then were you doing?"

Nanda thought; her smile was as usual the faintest discernible outward
sign. "Thinking of YOU."

"So tremendously hard?"

"Well, of other things too and of other persons. Of everything really
that in our last talk I told you I felt I must have out with myself
before meeting you for what I suppose you've now in mind."

Mr. Longdon had kept his eyes on her, but at this he turned away; not,
however, for an alternative, embracing her material situation with the
embarrassed optimism of Vanderbank or the mitigated gloom of Mitchy.
"Ah"--he took her up with some dryness--"you've been having things out
with yourself?" But he went on before she answered: "I don't want any
tea, thank you. I found myself, after five, in such a fidget that I
went three times in the course of the hour to my club, where I've the
impression I each time had it. I dare say it wasn't there, though, I
did have it," he after an instant pursued, "for I've somehow a confused
image of a shop in Oxford Street--or was it rather in Regent?--into
which I gloomily wandered to beguile the moments with a mixture that if
I strike you as upset I beg you to set it all down to. Do you know in
fact what I've been doing for the last ten minutes? Roaming hither and
thither in your beautiful Crescent till I could venture to come in."

"Then did you see Mitchy go out? But no, you wouldn't"--Nanda corrected
herself. "He has been gone longer than that."

Her visitor had dropped on a sofa where, propped by the back, he sat
rather upright, his glasses on his nose, his hands in his pockets and
his elbows much turned out. "Mitchy left you more than ten minutes ago,
and yet your state on his departure remains such that there could be a
bus