Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/365

BOOK EIGHTH: TISHY GRENDON given, as it happened, their places in the group, rather publicly confronted with Mr. Longdon. "Is his wife in the other room?" Mrs. Brook now put to Tishy.

Tishy, after a stare about, came back to consciousness to account for this guest. "Oh yes—she's playing with him."

"But with whom, dear?"

"Why, with Petherton. I thought you knew."

"Knew they're playing—?" Mrs. Brook was almost Socratic.

"She's regularly wound up," her husband meanwhile, without resonance, observed to Vanderbank.

"Brilliant indeed!" Vanderbank replied.

"But she's rather naughty, you know," Edward, after a pause, continued.

"Oh, villanous!" his interlocutor said with a short, smothered laugh that might, for a spectator, have represented a sudden start at such a flash of analysis from such a quarter.

When Vanderbank's attention, at any rate, was free again, their hostess, assisted to the transition, was describing the play, as she had called it, of the absentees. "She has hidden a book, and he's trying to find it."

"Hide and seek? Why, isn't it innocent, Mitch!" Mrs. Brook exclaimed.

Mitchy, speaking for the first time, faced her with extravagant gloom. "Do you really think so?"

"That's her innocence!" the Duchess laughed.

"And don't you suppose he has found it yet?" Mrs. Brook pursued earnestly to Tishy. "Isn't it something we might all play at if—?" On which, however, suddenly checking herself, she changed her note. "Nanda, love, please go and invite them to join us."

Mitchy, at this, on his ottoman, wheeled straight round to the girl, who looked at him before speaking. "I'll go if Mitchy tells me." 355