Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/415

BOOK NINTH: VANDERBANK after a long absence, here a while since, as if expressly to see her. But after spending half an hour, he went away without it."

Mr. Longdon's watch continued. "He spent the half-hour with her mother instead?"

"Oh, 'instead'—it was hardly that. He at all events dropped his idea."

"And what had it been, his idea?"

"You speak as if he had as many as I!" Mitchy replied. "In a manner indeed he has," he contiued [sic] as if for himself. "But they're of a different kind," he said to Mr. Longdon.

"What had it been, his idea?" the old man, however, simply repeated.

Mitchy's confession, at this, seemed to explain his previous evasion. "We shall never know."

Mr. Longdon hesitated, "He won't tell you?"

"Me?" Mitchy had a pause. "Less than any one."

Many things they had not spoken had already passed between them, and something, evidently, to the sense of each, passed during the moment that followed this. "While you were abroad," Mr. Longdon presently asked, "did you hear from him?"

"Never. And I wrote nothing."

"Like me," said Mr. Longdon. "I've neither written nor heard."

"Ah, but with you it will be different." Mr. Longdon, as if with the outbreak of an agitation hitherto controlled, had turned abruptly away and, with the usual swing of his glass, begun almost wildly to wander. "You will hear."

"I shall be curious."

"Oh, but what Nanda wants, you know, is that you shouldn't be too much so."

Mr. Longdon thoughtfully rambled. "Too much—?"

"To let him off, as we were saying, easily." 405