erday to what you've been about."

"I've been about nothing but what among you people I'm always about.
I've been seeing, feeling, thinking. That makes no show, of course I'm
aware, for any one but myself, and it's wholly my own affair. Except
indeed," he added, "so far as I've taken into my head to make, on it
all, this special appeal. There are things that have come home to me."

"Oh I see, I see," Vanderbank showed the friendliest alertness. "I'm to
take it from you then, with all the avidity of my vanity, that I strike
you as the person best able to understand what they are."

Mr. Longdon appeared to wonder an instant if his intelligence now had
not almost too much of a glitter: he kept the same position, his back
against the table, and while Vanderbank, on the settee, pressed upright
against the wall, they recognised in silence that they were trying each
other. "You're much the best of them. I've my ideas about you. You've
great gifts."

"Well then, we're worthy of each other. When Greek meets Greek--!" and
the young man laughed while, a little with the air of bracing himself,
he folded his arms. "Here we are."

His companion looked at him a moment longer, then, turning away, went
slowly round the table. On the further side of it he stopped again and,
after a minute, with a nervous movement, set a ball or two in motion.
"It's beautiful--but it's terrible!" he finally murmured. He hadn't his
eyes on Vanderbank, who for a minute said nothing, and he presently went
on: "To see it and not to want to try to help--well, I can't do that."
Vanderbank, still neither speaking nor moving, remained as if he might
interrupt something of high importance, and his friend, passing along
the opposite edge of the table, continued to produce in the stillness,
without the cue, the small click of the ivory. "How long--if you don't
mind my asking--have you known it?"

Even for this at first Vanderbank had no answer--none but to rise from
his place, come down to the floor and, standing there, look at Mr.
Longdon across the table. He was serious now, but without being solemn.
"How can one tell? One can never be sure. A man may fancy, may wonder;
but about a girl, a person so much younger than himself and so much more
helpless, he feels a--what shall I call it?"

"A delicacy?" Mr. Longdon suggested. "It may be that; the name doesn't
matter; at all events he's embarrassed. He wants not to be an ass on the
one side and yet not some oth