ng a great deal for anybody--that he should come down at
all; so that it would add immensely to his burden if anybody had to be
remembered for it."

"I don't know what you mean by a man 'like me,'" Vanderbank returned.
"I'm not any particular kind of a man." She had been looking at him, but
she looked away on this, and he continued good-humoured and explanatory.
"If you mean that I go about such a lot, how do you know it but by the
fact that you're everywhere now yourself?--so that, whatever I am, in
short, you're just as bad."

"You admit then that you ARE everywhere. I may be just as bad," the girl
went on, "but the point is that I'm not nearly so good. Girls are such
natural hacks--they can't be anything else."

"And pray what are fellows who are in the beastly grind of fearfully
busy offices? There isn't an old cabhorse in London that's kept at it,
I assure you, as I am. Besides," the young man added, "if I'm out every
night and off somewhere like this for Sunday, can't you understand, my
dear child, the fundamental reason of it?"

Nanda, with her eyes on him again, studied an instant this mystery.
"Am I to infer with delight that it's the sweet hope of meeting ME? It
isn't," she continued in a moment, "as if there were any necessity
for your saying that. What's the use?" But all impatiently she stopped
short.

He was eminently gay even if his companion was not. "Because we're such
jolly old friends that we really needn't so much as speak at all? Yes,
thank goodness--thank goodness." He had been looking round him, taking
in the scene; he had dropped his hat on the ground and, completely at
his ease, though still more wishing to show it, had crossed his legs and
closely folded his arms. "What a tremendously jolly place! If I can't
for the life of me recall who they were--the other people--I've the
comfort of being sure their minds are an equal blank. Do they even
remember the place they had? 'We had some fellows down at--where was it,
the big white house last November?--and there was one of them, out of
the What-do-you-call-it?--YOU know--who might have been a decent enough
chap if he hadn't presumed so on his gifts.'" Vanderbank paused a
minute, but his companion said nothing, and he pursued. "It does show,
doesn't it?--the fact that we do meet this way--the tremendous change
that has taken place in your life in the last three months. I mean, if
I'm everywhere as you said just now, your being just the same."