Page:The Awkward Age (New York, Harper and Brothers, 1899).djvu/433

BOOK TENTH: NANDA them one by one—the next some other time. You always seem to me to hold the strings of such a lot of queer little dramas. Have something on the shelf for me when we meet again. The thing, just now, is the outlook for Mitchy's affair. One cares enough for old Mitch to fancy one may feel safer for a lead or two. In fact I want regularly to turn you on."

"Ah, but the thing I happen to have taken it into my head to say to you," Nanda now placidly enough replied, "hasn't the least bit to do, I assure you, either with Aggie or with 'old Mitch.' If you don't want to hear it—want some way of getting off—please believe they won't help you a bit." It was quite, in fact, that she felt herself at last to have found the right tone. Nothing less than a conviction of this could have made her after an instant add: "What in the world, Mr. Van, are you afraid of?"

Well, that it was the right tone a single little minute was sufficient to prove—a minute, I must yet haste to say, big enough, in spite of its smallness, to contain the longest look ever, on any occasion, exchanged between these friends. It was one of those looks—not so frequent, it must be admitted, as the muse of history, dealing at best in short cuts, is often, by the conditions of her trade, reduced to representing them—which, after they have come and gone, are felt not only to have changed relations, but absolutely to have cleared the air. It certainly helped Yanderbank to find his answer. "I'm only afraid, I think, of your conscience."

He had been indeed, for the space, more helped than she. "My conscience?"

"Think it over—quite at your leisure—and some day you'll understand. There's no hurry," he continued—"no hurry. And when you do understand, it needn't make your existence a burden to you to fancy you must tell me." Oh, he was so kind—kinder than ever now. 423