Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/119

BOOK THIRD: MR. LONGDON Longdon, whom she fixed with her mild straightness; which led to Mitchy's carrying on and repeating the appeal. "Isn't Mrs. Brook charming? What do you suppose is her idea?"

It was a bound into the mystery, a bound of which his fellow-visitor stood quite unconscious, only looking at Nanda still with the same coldness of wonder. All expression had, for the minute, been arrested in Mr. Longdon, but he at last began to show that it had merely been retarded. Yet it was almost with solemnity that he put forth his hand. "How do you do?—how do you do? I'm so glad—!"

Nanda shook hands with him as if she had done so already, though it might have been just her look of curiosity that detracted from her air of amusing herself. "Mother has wanted me awfully to see you. She told me to give you her love," she said. Then she added with odd irrelevance: "I didn't come in the carriage, nor in a cab or an omnibus."

"You came on a bicycle?" Mitchy inquired.

"No, I walked." She still spoke without a gleam. "Mother wants me to do everything."

"Even to walk!" Mitchy laughed. "Oh yes, we must, in these times, keep up our walking!" The ingenious observer just now suggested might even have detected in the still higher rise of this visitor's spirits a want of mere inward ease.

She had taken no notice of the effect upon him of her mention of her mother, and she took none, visibly, of Mr. Longdon's manner or of his words. What she did, while the two men, without offering her, either, a seat, practically lost themselves in their deepening vision, was to give her attention to all the place, looking at the books, pictures and other significant objects, and especially at the small table set out for tea, to which the servant who had admitted her now returned with a 109