She met him with an almost extravagant eagerness that the meeting should be just where he wished. “I don’t take in everything, but I take in all I can. That’s a great affair in London to-day, and I often feel as if I were a circus-woman, in pink tights and no particular skirts, riding half a dozen horses at once. We’re all in the troupe now, I suppose,” she smiled, “and we must travel with the show. But when you say we’re different,” she added, “think, after all, of mamma.” Mr. Longdon stared. “It’s from her you ARE different.” “Ah but she had an awfully fine mind. We’re not cleverer than she.” His conscious honest eyes looked away an instant. “It’s perhaps enough for the present that you’re cleverer than I! I was very glad the other day,” he continued, “to make the acquaintance of your daughter. I hoped I should find her with you.” If Mrs. Brook cast about it was but for a few seconds. “If she had known you were coming she would certainly have been here. She wanted so to please you.” Then as her visitor took no further notice of this speech than to ask if Nanda were out of the house she had to admit it as an aggravation of failure; but she pursued in the next breath: “Of course you won’t care, but she raves about you.” He appeared indeed at first not to care. “Isn’t she eighteen?”--it was oddly abrupt. “I have to think. Wouldn’t it be nearer twenty?” Mrs. Brook audaciously returned. She tried again. “She told me all about your interview. I stayed away on purpose--I had my idea.” “And what WAS your idea?” “I thought she’d remind you more of mamma if I wasn’t there. But she’s a little person who sees. Perhaps you didn’t think it, but she knew.” “And what did she know?” asked Mr. Longdon, who was unable, however, to keep from his tone a certain coldness which really deprived the question of its proper curiosity. Mrs. Brook just showed the chill of it, but she had always her courage. “Why that you don’t like her.” She had the courage of carrying off as well as of backing out. “She too has her little place with the circus--it’s the way we earn our living.” Mr. Longdon said nothing for a moment and when he at last spoke it was almost with an air of contradiction. “She’s your mother to the life.” His hostess, for three seconds, looked at him hard. “Ah but with such differences! You’ll lose it,” she added with a headshake of pity. He had his eyes only on Vanderbank. “Well, my losses are my own affair.” Then his face came back. “Did she tell you I didn’t like her?” The indulgence in Mrs. Brook’s view of his simplicity was marked. “You thought you succeeded so in hiding it? No matter--she bears up. I think she really feels a great deal as I do--that it’s no matter how many of us you hate if you’ll only go on feeling as you do about mamma. Show us THAT--that’s what we want.” Nothing could have expressed more the balm of reassurance, but the mild drops had fallen short of the spot to which they were directed. “‘Show’ you?”