given up the hope?"

"Yes--though not ME altogether. He has given up the hope he originally
had."

"He gives up quickly--in three months!"

"Oh these three months," she answered, "have been a long time: the
fullest, the most important, for what has happened in them, of my life."
She still poked at the ground; then she added: "And all thanks to YOU."

"To me?"--Vanderbank couldn't fancy!

"Why, for what we were speaking of just now--my being to-day so in
everything and squeezing up and down no matter whose staircase. Isn't it
one crowded hour of glorious life?" she asked. "What preceded it was an
age, no doubt--but an age without a name."

Vanderbank watched her a little in silence, then spoke quite beside
the question. "It's astonishing how at moments you remind me of your
mother!"

At this she got up. "Ah there it is! It's what I shall never shake off.
That, I imagine, is what Mr. Longdon feels."

Both on their feet now, as if ready for the others, they yet--and even
a trifle awkwardly--lingered. It might in fact have appeared to a
spectator that some climax had come, on the young man's part, to some
state of irresolution about the utterance of something. What were the
words so repeatedly on his lips, yet so repeatedly not sounded? It would
have struck our observer that they were probably not those his lips
even now actually formed. "Doesn't he perhaps talk to you too much about
yourself?"

Nanda gave him a dim smile, and he might indeed then have exclaimed on a
certain resemblance, a resemblance of expression that had nothing to
do with form. It wouldn't have been diminished for him moreover by her
successful suppression of every sign that she felt his question a little
of a snub. The recall he had previously mentioned could, however, as she
answered him, only have been brushed away by a supervening sense of his
roughness. "It probably isn't so much that as my own way of going on."
She spoke with a mildness that could scarce have been so full without
being an effort. "Between his patience and my egotism anything's
possible. It isn't his talking--it's his listening." She gave up the
point, at any rate, as if from softness to her actual companion. "Wasn't
it you who spoke to mamma about my sitting with her? That's what I mean
by my debt to you. It's through you that I'm always there--through you
and perhaps a little through Mitchy."

"Oh through Mitchy--it MUST have been--more than through me." Vanderbank