, I did have her lovely eyes or her distinguished
nose or the shape of her forehead or the colour of her hair. Strange as
it is in a daughter I'm disconnected altogether, and don't you think
I MAY be a little saved for you by becoming thus simply out of
the question? Of course," she continued, "your real trial is poor
Nanda--she's likewise so fearfully out of it and yet she's so fearfully
in it. And she," said Mrs. Brook for a climax--"SHE doesn't know!"

A strange faint flush, while she talked, had come into Mr. Longdon's
face, and, whatever effect, as she put it, she produced on him, it was
clearly not that of causing his attention to wander. She held him at
least for weal or woe; his bright eyes grew brighter and opened into a
stare that finally seemed to offer him as submerged in mere wonder. At
last, however, he rose to the surface, and he appeared to have lighted
at the bottom of the sea on the pearl of the particular wisdom
he needed. "I dare say there may be something in what you so
extraordinarily suggest."

She jumped at it as if in pleasant pain. "In just letting me go--?"

But at this he dropped. "I shall never let you go."

It renewed her fear. "Not just for what I AM?"

He rose from his place beside her, but looking away from her and with
his colour marked. "I shall never let you go," he repeated.

"Oh you angel!" She sprang up more quickly and the others were by this
time on their feet. "I've done it, I've done it!" she joyously cried to
Vanderbank; "he likes me, or at least he can bear me--I've found him the
way; and now I don't care even if he SAYS I haven't." Then she turned
again to her old friend. "We can manage about Nanda--you needn't ever
see her. She's 'down' now, but she can go up again. We can arrange it at
any rate--c'est la moindre des choses."

"Upon my honour I protest," Mr. Cashmore exclaimed, "against anything
of the sort! I defy you to 'arrange' that young lady in any such manner
without also arranging ME. I'm one of her greatest admirers," he gaily
announced to Mr. Longdon.

Vanderbank said nothing, and Mr. Longdon seemed to show he would have
preferred to do the same: that visitor's eyes might have represented
an appeal to him somehow to intervene, to show the due acquaintance,
springing from practice and wanting in himself, with the art of
conversation developed to the point at which it could thus sustain a
lady in the upper air. Vanderbank's silence might, without his mere ki