s and catching
side-lights for shocks. "Don't talk nonsense," he continued as his
friend attempted once more to throw in a protest; "I belong to a
different period of history. There have been things this evening that
have made me feel as if I had been disinterred--literally dug up from a
long sleep. I assure you there have!"--he really pressed the point.

Vanderbank wondered a moment what things in particular these might be;
he found himself wanting to get at everything his visitor represented,
to enter into his consciousness and feel, as it were, on his side. He
glanced with an intention freely sarcastic at an easy possibility. "The
extraordinary vitality of Brookenham?"

Mr. Longdon, with nippers in place again, fixed on him a gravity
that failed to prevent his discovering in the eyes behind them a shy
reflexion of his irony. "Oh Brookenham! You must tell me all about
Brookenham."

"I see that's not what you mean."

Mr. Longdon forbore to deny it. "I wonder if you'll understand what I
mean." Vanderbank bristled with the wish to be put to the test, but was
checked before he could say so. "And what's HIS place--Brookenham's?"

"Oh Rivers and Lakes--an awfully good thing. He got it last year."

Mr. Longdon--but not too grossly--wondered. "How did he get it?"

Vanderbank laughed. "Well, SHE got it."

His friend remained grave. "And about how much now--?"

"Oh twelve hundred--and lots of allowances and boats and things. To do
the work!" Vanderbank, still with a certain levity, added.

"And what IS the work?"

The young man had a pause. "Ask HIM. He'll like to tell you."

"Yet he seemed to have but little to say." Mr. Longdon exactly measured
it again.

"Ah not about that. Try him."

He looked more sharply at his host, as if vaguely suspicious of a trap;
then not less vaguely he sighed. "Well, it's what I came up for--to try
you all. But do they live on that?" he continued.

Vanderbank once more debated. "One doesn't quite know what they live on.
But they've means--for it was just that fact, I remember, that showed
Brookenham's getting the place wasn't a job. It was given, I mean, not
to his mere domestic need, but to his notorious efficiency. He has a
property--an ugly little place in Gloucestershire--which they sometimes
let. His elder brother has the better one, but they make up an income."

Mr. Longdon for an instant lost himself. "Yes, I remember--one heard of
those things at the time. And SHE must h