Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/350

THE AWKWARD AGE that he had retired to a great distance; yet even this position he must have launched a glance that showed him a middle way. "They both know you're watching them."

"And don't they know you are? Poor Mr. Van has a consciousness!"

"So should I if two terrible women—"

"Were admiring you both at once?" The Duchess folded the big feathered fan that had partly protected their range. "Well, she, poor dear, can't help it. She wants him herself."

At the drop of the Duchess's fan he restored his nippers. "And he doesn't—not a bit—want her!"

"There it is. She has put down her money, as it were, without a return. She has given Mitchy up and got nothing instead."

There was delicacy, yet there was distinctness, in Mr. Longdon's reserve. "Do you call me nothing?"

The Duchess, at this, fairly swelled with her happy stare. "Then it is an adoption?" She forbore to press, however; she only went on: "It isn't a question, my dear man, of what I call it. You don't make love to her."

"Dear me," said Mr. Longdon, "what would she have had?"

"That could be more charming, you mean, than your famous 'loyalty'? Oh, caro mio, she wants it straighter! But I shock you," his companion quickly added.

The manner in which he firmly rose was scarce a denial; yet he stood for a moment in place. "What, after all, can she do?"

"She can keep Mr. Van."

Mr. Longdon wondered. "Where?"

"I mean till it's too late. She can work on him."

"But how?"

Covertly again the Duchess had followed the effect of 340