Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/305

BOOK SEVENTH: MITCHY fullest recognition that there was something he was there to discuss with her, but with the assurance in every soft sound of him that no height to which she might lift the discussion would be too great for him to reach. His every cadence and every motion was an implication, as from one to the other, of the exquisite. Oh, he could sustain it! "Well, I mean the establishment of something between us. I mean your arranging somehow that we shall be drawn more together—know together something nobody else knows. I should like so terrifically to have a secret with you."

"Oh, if that's all you want, you can be easily gratified. Rien de plus facile, as mamma says. I'm full of secrets—I think I'm really most secretive. I'll share almost any one of them with you—that is if it's a good one."

Mitchy hesitated. "You mean you'll choose it yourself? You won't let it be one of mine?"

Nanda wondered. "But what's the difference?"

Her companion jumped up again, and for a moment pervaded the place. "When you say such things as that, you're of a beauty—! May it," he asked as he stopped before her, "be one of mine—a perfectly awful one?"

She showed her clearest interest. "As I suppose the most awful secrets are the best—yes, certainly."

"I'm hideously tempted." But he hung fire; then dropping into his chair again: "It would be too bad. I'm afraid I can't."

"Then why won't this do, just as it is?"

"'This'?" He looked over the big bland room. "Which?"

"Why, what you're here for?"

"My dear child, I'm here—most of all—to love you more than ever; and there's an absence of favoring mystery about that—"

She looked at him as if seeing what he meant, and 295