s glasses. "Well--the clue's Nanda Brookenham."

"Oh I see." His friend had responded quickly, but for a minute said
nothing more, and the great marble clock that gave the place the air
of a club ticked louder in the stillness. Mr. Longdon waited with a
benevolent want of mercy, yet with a look in his face that spoke of what
depended for him--though indeed very far within--on the upshot of his
patience. The hush between them, for that matter, became a conscious
public measure of the young man's honesty. He evidently at last felt
it as such, and there would have been for an observer of his handsome
controlled face a study of some sharp things. "I judge that you ask me
for such an utterance," he finally said, "as very few persons at any
time have the right to expect of a man. Think of the people--and very
decent ones--to whom on so many a question one must only reply that it's
none of their business."

"I see you know what I mean," said Mr. Longdon.

"Then you know also the distinguished exception I make of you. There
isn't another man with whom I'd talk of it."

"And even to me you don't! But I'm none the less obliged to you," Mr.
Longdon added.

"It isn't only the gravity," his companion went on; "it's the ridicule
that inevitably attaches--!"

The manner in which Mr. Longdon indicated the empty room was in itself
an interruption. "Don't I sufficiently spare you?"

"Thank you, thank you," said Vanderbank.

"Besides, it's not for nothing."

"Of course not!" the young man returned, though with a look of noting
the next moment a certain awkwardness in his concurrence. "But don't
spare me now."

"I don't mean to." Mr. Longdon had his back to the table again, on which
he rested with each hand on the rim. "I don't mean to," he repeated.

His victim gave a laugh that betrayed at least the drop of a tension.
"Yet I don't quite see what you can do to me."

"It's just what for some time past I've been trying to think."

"And at last you've discovered?"

"Well--it has finally glimmered out a little in this extraordinary
place."

Vanderbank frankly wondered. "In consequence of anything particular that
has happened?"

Mr. Longdon had a pause. "For an old idiot who notices as much as
I something particular's always happening. If you're a man of
imagination--"

"Oh," Vanderbank broke in, "I know how much more in that case you're
one! It only makes me regret," he continued, "that I've not attended
more since yest