ing to come?" Nanda replied to this.

"What in the world is very big, my child, but the beauty of this hour?
I haven't the least idea WHAT, when I got Mr. Longdon's note, I gave
up. Don't ask me for an account of anything; everything went--became
imperceptible. I WILL say that for myself: I shed my badness, I do
forget people, with a facility that makes me, for bits, for little
patches, so far as they're concerned, cease to BE; so that my life is
spotted all over with momentary states in which I'm as the dead of whom
nothing's said but good." He had strolled toward her again while she
smiled at him. "I've died for this, Nanda."

"The only difficulty I see," she presently replied, "is that you ought
to marry a woman really clever and that I'm not quite sure what there
may be of that in Aggie."

"In Aggie?" her friend echoed very gently. "Is THAT what you've sent for
me for--to talk about Aggie?"

"Didn't it occur to you it might be?"

"That it couldn't possibly, you mean, be anything else?" He looked about
for the place in which it would express the deepest surrender to the
scene to sit--then sank down with a beautiful prompt submission. "I've
no idea of what occurred to me--nothing at least but the sense that I
had occurred to YOU. The occurrence is clay in the hands of the potter.
Do with me what you will."

"You appreciate everything so wonderfully," Nanda said, "that it
oughtn't to be hard for you to appreciate HER. I do dream so you may
save her. That's why I haven't waited."

"The only thing that remains to me in life," he answered, "is a certain
accessibility to the thought of what I may still do to figure a little
in your eye; but that's precisely a thought you may assist to become
clearer. You may for instance give me some pledge or sign that if I do
figure--prance and caracole and sufficiently kick up the dust--your
eye won't suffer itself to be distracted from me. I think there's no
adventure I'm not ready to undertake for you; yet my passion--chastened,
through all this, purified, austere--is still enough of this world not
wholly to have renounced the fancy of some small reward."

"How small?" the girl asked.

She spoke as if feeling she must take from him in common kindness
at least as much as she would make him take, and the serious anxious
patience such a consciousness gave her tone was met by Mitchy with
a charmed reasonableness that his habit of hyperbole did nothing to
misrepresent. He glowed