Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/121

BOOK THIRD: MR. LONGDON come alone? How jolly of her!" Pulling off her gloves, Nanda had come immediately to his assistance; on which, quitting the table and laying hands on Mr. Longdon's shoulders to push him toward a sofa, he continued to talk, to sound a note of which the humor was the exaggeration of his flurry. "How jolly of you to be willing to come—most awfully kind! I hope she isn't ill? Do, Mitchy, lie down. Down, Mitchy, down!—that's the only way to keep you." He had waited for no account of Mrs. Brookenham's health, and it might have been apparent—still to our sharp spectator—that he found nothing wonderful in her daughter's unsupported arrival.

"I can make tea beautifully," she said from behind her table. "Mother showed me how this morning."

"This morning?"—and Mitchy, who, before the fire and still erect, had declined to be laid low, greeted the simple remark with uproarious mirth. "Dear young lady, you're the most delicious family!"

"She showed me at breakfast about the little things to do. She thought I might have to make it here and told me to offer," the girl went on. "I haven't yet done it this way at home—I usually have my tea upstairs. They bring it up in a cup, all made and very weak, with a piece of bread-and-butter in the saucer. That's because I'm so young. Tishy never lets me touch hers, either; so we had to make up for lost time. That's what mother said"—she followed up her story, and her young distinctness had clearly something to do with a certain pale concentration in Mr. Longdon's face. "Mother isn't ill, but she told me already yesterday she wouldn't come. She said it's really all for me. I'm sure I hope it is!"—with which there flickered in her eyes, dimly but perhaps all the more prettily, the first intimation they had given of the light of laughter. "She told me you would understand, Mr. Van—from something you've 111