und herself in the park, at some distance from the house. It
was a point she had had to take another rise to reach, a place marked
by an old green bench for a larger sweep of the view, which, in the
distance where the woods stopped, showed in the most English way in the
world the colour-spot of an old red village and the tower of an old
grey church. She had sunk down upon the bench almost with a sense of
adventure, yet not too fluttered to wonder if it wouldn't have been
happy to bring a book; the charm of which precisely would have been in
feeling everything about her too beautiful to let her read.

The sense of adventure grew in her, presently becoming aware of a stir
in the thicket below, followed by the coming into sight, on a path that,
mounting, passed near her seat, of a wanderer whom, had his particular,
his exceptional identity not quickly appeared, it might have
disappointed her a trifle to have to recognise as a friend. He saw her
immediately, stopped, laughed, waved his hat, then bounded up the slope
and, brushing his forehead with his handkerchief, confessing as to a
red face, was rejoicingly there before her. Her own ejaculation on first
seeing him--"Why, Mr. Van!"--had had an ambiguous sharpness that was
rather for herself than for her visitor. She made room for him on
the bench, where in a moment he was cooling off and they were both
explaining. The great thing was that he had walked from the station to
stretch his legs, coming far round, for the lovely hour and the pleasure
of it, by a way he had learnt on some previous occasion of being at
Mertle.

"You've already stayed here then?" Nanda, who had arrived but half
an hour before, spoke as if she had lost the chance to give him a new
impression.

"I've stayed here--yes, but not with Mitchy; with some people or
other--who the deuce can they have been?--who had the place for a few
months a year or two ago."

"Don't you even remember?"

Vanderbank wondered and laughed. "It will come to me. But it's a
charming sign of London relations, isn't it?--that one CAN come down to
people this way and be awfully well 'done for' and all that, and then
go away and lose the whole thing, quite forget to whom one has been
beholden. It's a queer life."

Nanda seemed for an instant to wish to say that one might deny the
queerness, but she said something else instead. "I suppose a man
like you doesn't quite feel that he IS beholden. It's awfully good of
him--it's doi