have gathered, had we seen fully recorded in Vanderbank's face the
degree to which this prompt response embarrassed or at least stupefied
him. But he could always provisionally laugh. "I like your 'in London
now'!"

"It's the tone and the current and the effect of all the others that
push you along," she went on as if she hadn't heard him. "If such things
are contagious, as every one says, you prove it perhaps as much as any
one. But you don't begin"--she continued blandly enough to work it out
for him; "or you can't at least originally have begun. Any one would
know that now--from the terrific effect I see I produce on you--by
talking this way. There it is--it's all out before one knows it, isn't
it, and I can't help it any more than you can, can I?" So she appeared
to put it to him, with something in her lucidity that would have been
infinitely touching; a strange grave calm consciousness of their common
doom and of what in especial in it would be worst for herself. He sprang
up indeed after an instant as if he had been infinitely touched; he
turned away, taking just near her a few steps to and fro, gazed about
the place again, but this time without the air of particularly seeing
it, and then came back to her as if from a greater distance. An observer
at all initiated would, at the juncture, fairly have hung on his
lips, and there was in fact on Vanderbank's part quite the look of the
man--though it lasted but just while we seize it--in suspense about
himself. The most initiated observer of all would have been poor Mr.
Longdon, in that case destined, however, to be also the most defeated,
with the sign of his tension a smothered "Ah if he doesn't do it NOW!"
Well, Vanderbank didn't do it "now," and the odd slow irrelevant sigh he
gave out might have sufficed as the record of his recovery from a peril
lasting just long enough to be measured. Had there been any measure of
it meanwhile for Nanda? There was nothing at least to show either the
presence or the relief of anxiety in the way in which, by a prompt
transition, she left her last appeal to him simply to take care of
itself. "You haven't denied that Harold does borrow."

He gave a sound as of cheer for this luckily firmer ground. "My dear
child, I never lent the silly boy five pounds in my life. In fact I like
the way you talk of that. I don't know quite for what you take me, but
the number of persons to whom I HAVE lent five pounds--!"

"Is so awfully small"--sh