he
garden-nook they had occupied; picking up a newspaper and changing
the place of a cushion. "I do think that with him you're remarkable,"
Vanderbank observed--"putting on one side all you seem to know and on
the other all he holds his tongue about. What then DOES he say?" the
young man asked after a slight pause and perhaps even with a slight
irritation.

Nanda glanced round again--she was folding, rather carefully, her paper.
Presently her glance met their friend, who, having come out of one of
the long windows that opened to the lawn, had stopped there to watch
them. "He says just now that luncheon's ready."

II

"I've made him," she said in the drawing-room to Mitchy, "make Mr. Van
go with him."

Mr. Longdon, in the rain, which had come on since the morning, had
betaken himself to church, and his other guest, with sufficiently marked
good humour, had borne him company. The windows of the drawing-room
looked at the wet garden, all vivid and rich in the summer shower, and
Mitchy, after seeing Vanderbank turn up his trousers and fling back
a last answer to the not quite sincere chaff his submission had
engendered, adopted freely and familiarly the prospect not only of a
grateful freshened lawn, but of a good hour in the very pick, as he
called it, of his actual happy conditions. The favouring rain, the dear
old place, the charming serious house, the large inimitable room, the
absence of the others, the present vision of what his young friend had
given him to count on--the sense of these delights was expressed in his
fixed generous glare. He was at first too pleased even to sit down; he
measured the great space from end to end, admiring again everything he
had admired before and protesting afresh that no modern ingenuity--not
even his own, to which he did justice--could create effects of such
purity. The final touch in the picture before them was just the
composer's ignorance. Mr. Longdon had not made his house, he had simply
lived it, and the "taste" of the place--Mitchy in certain connexions
abominated the word--was just nothing more than the beauty of his life.
Everything on every side had dropped straight from heaven, with nowhere
a bargaining thumb-mark, a single sign of the shop. All this would have
been a wonderful theme for discourse in Buckingham Crescent--so happy an
exercise for the votaries of that temple of analysis that he repeatedly
spoke of their experience of it as crying aloud for Mrs. Brook. T