," he
returned.

"Well, you can have all you want now!" Vanderbank laughed.

His friend gave a slow droll headshake. "I don't want them 'now'!"

"You could do with them, my dear sir, still," Vanderbank continued in
the same manner, "every bit _I_ do!"

"I'm sure you do nothing you oughtn't." Mr. Longdon kept the photograph
and continued to look at it. "Her mother told me about her--promised me
I should see her next time."

"You must--she's a great friend of mine."

Mr. Longdon was really deep in it. "Is she clever?"

Vanderbank turned it over. "Well, you'll tell me if you think so."

"Ah with a child of seventeen--!" Mr. Longdon murmured it as if in dread
of having to pronounce. "This one too IS seventeen?"

Vanderbank again considered. "Eighteen." He just hung fire once
more, then brought out: "Well, call it nearly nineteen. I've kept her
birthdays," he laughed.

His companion caught at the idea. "Upon my honour _I_ should like to!
When is the next?"

"You've plenty of time--the fifteenth of June."

"I'm only too sorry to wait." Laying down the object he had been
examining Mr. Longdon took another turn about the room, and his manner
was such an appeal to his host to accept his restlessness that as he
circulated the latter watched him with encouragement. "I said to you
just now that I knew the mothers, but it would have been more to the
point to say the grandmothers." He stopped before his young friend,
then nodded at the image of Nanda. "I knew HERS. She put it at something
less."

Vanderbank rather failed to understand. "The old lady? Put what?"

Mr. Longdon's face showed him as for a moment feeling his way. "I'm
speaking of Mrs. Brookenham. She spoke of her daughter as only sixteen."

Vanderbank's amusement at the tone of this broke out. "She usually does!
She has done so, I think, for the last year or two."

His visitor dropped upon his sofa as with the weight of something sudden
and fresh; then from this place, with a sharp little movement, tossed
into the fire the end of a cigarette. Vanderbank offered him another,
and as he accepted it and took a light he said: "I don't know what
you're doing with me--I never at home smoke so much!" But he puffed away
and, seated near, laid his hand on Vanderbank's arm as to help himself
to utter something too delicate not to be guarded and yet too important
not to be risked. "Now that's the sort of thing I did mean--as one of
my impressions." Vanderbank conti