"Do you know that's a great deal to say--what you said just
now? I mean about your being the best friend I have."

"Of course I do, and that's exactly why I said it. You see I'm not in
the least delicate or graceful or shy about it--I just come out with
it and defy you to contradict me. Who, if I'm not the best, is a better
one?"

"Well," Nanda replied, "I feel since I've known Mr. Longdon that I've
almost the sort of friend who makes every one else not count."

"Then at the end of three months he has arrived at a value for you that
I haven't reached in all these years?"

"Yes," she returned--"the value of my not being afraid of him."

Vanderbank, on the bench, shifted his position, turning more to her and
throwing an arm over the back. "And you're afraid of ME?"

"Horribly--hideously."

"Then our long, our happy relations--?"

"They're just what makes my terror," she broke in, "particularly abject.
Happy relations don't matter. I always think of you with fear."

His elbow rested on the back and his hand supported his head. "How
awfully curious--if it be true!"

She had been looking away to the sweet English distance, but at this she
made a movement. "Oh Mr. Van, I'm 'true'!"

As Mr. Van himself couldn't have expressed at any subsequent time to any
interested friend the particular effect upon him of the tone of these
words his chronicler takes advantage of the fact not to pretend to a
greater intelligence--to limit himself on the contrary to the
simple statement that they produced in Mr. Van's cheek a flush just
discernible. "Fear of what?"

"I don't know. Fear is fear."

"Yes, yes--I see." He took out another cigarette and occupied a moment
in lighting it. "Well, kindness is kindness too--that's all one can
say."

He had smoked again a while before she turned to him. "Have I wounded
you by saying that?"

A certain effect of his flush was still in his smile. "It seems to me
I should like you to wound me. I did what I wanted a moment ago," he
continued with some precipitation: "I brought you out handsomely on the
subject of Mr. Longdon. That was my idea--just to draw you."

"Well," said Nanda, looking away again, "he has come into my life."

"He couldn't have come into a place where it gives me more pleasure to
see him."

"But he didn't like, the other day when I used it to him, that
expression," the girl returned. "He called it 'mannered modern slang'
and came back again to the extraordinary diff