chy, watching him more than he watched Mitchy, shook a mildly
decisive head. "No."

Vanderbank, his eyes on his smoke-puffs, seemed to wonder. "What you
wanted is--something else?"

"Something else."

"Oh!" said Vanderbank for the third time.

The ejaculation had been vague, but the movement that followed it was
definite; the young man, turning away, found himself again near the
chair he had quitted, and resumed possession of it as a sign of being
at his friend's service. This friend, however, not only hung fire but
finally went back to take a shot from a quarter they might have been
supposed to have left. "It strikes me as odd his imagining--awfully
acute as he is--that she has NOT guessed. One wouldn't have thought he
could live with her here in such an intimacy--seeing her every day and
pretty much all day--and make such a mistake."

Vanderbank, his great length all of a lounge again, turned it over. "And
yet I do thoroughly feel the mistake's not yours."

Mitchy had a new serenity of affirmation. "Oh it's not mine."

"Perhaps then"--it occurred to his friend--"he doesn't really believe
it."

"And only says so to make you feel more easy?"

"So that one may--in fairness to one's self--keep one's head, as it
were, and decide quite on one's own grounds."

"Then you HAVE still to decide?"

Vanderbank took time to answer. "I've still to decide." Mitchy became
again on this, in the sociable dusk, a slow-circling vaguely-agitated
element, and his companion continued: "Is your idea very generously and
handsomely to help that by letting me know--?"

"That I do definitely renounce"--Mitchy took him up--"any pretension and
any hope? Well, I'm ready with a proof of it. I've passed my word that
I'll apply elsewhere."

Vanderbank turned more round to him. "Apply to the Duchess for her
niece?"

"It's practically settled."

"But since when?"

Mitchy barely faltered. "Since this afternoon."

"Ah then not with the Duchess herself."

"With Nanda--whose plan from the first, you won't have forgotten, the
thing has so charmingly been."

Vanderbank could show that his not having in the least forgotten was yet
not a bar to his being now mystified. "But, my dear man, what can Nanda
'settle'?"

"My fate," Mitchy said, pausing well before him.

Vanderbank sat now a minute with raised eyes, catching the
indistinctness of the other's strange expression. "You're both beyond
me!" he exclaimed at last. "I don't see what