s affecting us in the same way." She had proceeded with
confidence, but suddenly she pulled up. "Don't tell me he IS mistaken--I
shouldn't be able to bear it." She challenged the pale old man with
a loveliness that was for the moment absolutely juvenile. "Aren't you
letting him--really?"

Mr. Longdon's smile was queer. "I can't prevent him. I'm not a great
house--to give orders to go over me. The kindness is Mr. Vanderbank's
own, and I've taken up, I'm afraid, a great deal of his precious time."

"You have indeed." Mrs. Brook was undiscouraged. "He has been talking
with me just now of nothing else. You may say," she went on, "that it's
I who have kept him at it. So I have, for his pleasure's a joy to us. If
you can't prevent what he feels, you know, you can't prevent either what
WE feel."

Mr. Longdon's face reflected for a minute something he could scarcely
have supposed her acute enough to make out, the struggle between his
real mistrust of her, founded on the unconscious violence offered by
her nature to his every memory of her mother, and his sense on the other
hand of the high propriety of his liking her; to which latter force his
interest in Vanderbank was a contribution, inasmuch as he was obliged
to recognise on the part of the pair an alliance it would have been
difficult to explain at Beccles. "Perhaps I don't quite see the value of
what your husband and you and I are in a position to do for him."

"Do you mean because he's himself so clever?"

"Well," said Mr. Longdon, "I dare say that's at the bottom of my feeling
so proud to be taken up by him. I think of the young men of MY time
and see that he takes in more. But that's what you all do," he rather
helplessly sighed. "You're very, very wonderful!"

She met him with an almost extravagant eagerness that the meeting should
be just where he wished. "I don't take in everything, but I take in all
I can. That's a great affair in London to-day, and I often feel as if
I were a circus-woman, in pink tights and no particular skirts, riding
half a dozen horses at once. We're all in the troupe now, I suppose,"
she smiled, "and we must travel with the show. But when you say we're
different," she added, "think, after all, of mamma."

Mr. Longdon stared. "It's from her you ARE different."

"Ah but she had an awfully fine mind. We're not cleverer than she."

His conscious honest eyes looked away an instant. "It's perhaps enough
for the present that you're cleverer