us, only looking at Nanda still with the same
coldness of wonder. All expression had for the minute been arrested
in Mr. Longdon, but he at last began to show that it had merely been
retarded. Yet it was almost with solemnity that he put forth his hand.
"How do you do? How do you do? I'm so glad!"

Nanda shook hands with him as if she had done so already, though it
might have been just her look of curiosity that detracted from her air
of amusing herself. "Mother has wanted me awfully to see you. She told
me to give you her love," she said. Then she added with odd irrelevance:
"I didn't come in the carriage, nor in a cab nor an omnibus."

"You came on a bicycle?" Mitchy enquired.

"No, I walked." She still spoke without a gleam. "Mother wants me to do
everything."

"Even to walk!" Mitchy laughed. "Oh yes, we must in these times keep up
our walking!" The ingenious observer just now suggested might even have
detected in the still higher rise of this visitor's spirits a want of
mere inward ease.

She had taken no notice of the effect upon him of her mention of her
mother, and she took none, visibly, of Mr. Longdon's manner or of his
words. What she did while the two men, without offering her, either, a
seat, practically lost themselves in their deepening vision, was to give
her attention all to the place, looking at the books, pictures and other
significant objects, and especially at the small table set out for tea,
to which the servant who had admitted her now returned with a steaming
kettle. "Isn't it charming here? Will there be any one else? Where IS
Mr. Van? Shall I make tea?" There was just a faint quaver, showing a
command of the situation more desired perhaps than achieved, in the very
rapid sequence of these ejaculations. The servant meanwhile had placed
the hot water above the little silver lamp and left the room.

"Do you suppose there's anything the matter? Oughtn't the man--or do you
know our host's room?" Mr. Longdon, addressing Mitchy with solicitude,
yet began to show in a countenance less blank a return of his sense of
relations. It was as if something had happened to him and he were in
haste to convert the signs of it into an appearance of care for the
proprieties.

"Oh," said Mitchy, "Van's only making himself beautiful"--which account
of their absent entertainer gained a point from his appearance at the
moment in the doorway furthest removed from the place where the three
were gathered.

Vander