“I DON’T give you leave and I beg you’ll hold your tongue,” Mrs. Brookenham returned. “You handle such matters with a minuteness--! In short,” she broke off to Mr. Longdon, “he would tell you a good deal more than you’ll care to know. She IS in a boat--but she’s an experienced mariner. Basta, as she would say. Do you know Mitchy?” Mrs. Brook suddenly asked. “Oh yes, he knows Mitchy”--Vanderbank had approached again. “Then make HIM tell him”--she put it before the young man as a charming turn for them all. “Mitchy CAN be refined when he tries.” “Oh dear--when Mitchy ‘tries’!” Vanderbank laughed. “I think I should rather, for the job, offer him to Mr. Longdon abandoned to his native wild impulse.” “I LIKE Mr. Mitchett,” the old man said, endeavouring to look his hostess straight in the eye and speaking as if somewhat to defy her to convict him, even from the point of view of Beccles, of a mistake. Mrs. Brookenham took it with a wonderful bright emotion. “My dear friend, vous me rendez la vie! If you can stand Mitchy you can stand any of us!” “Upon my honour I should think so!” Mr. Cashmore was eager to remark. “What on earth do you mean,” he demanded of Mrs. Brook, “by saying that I’m more ‘minute’ than he?” She turned her beauty an instant on this critic. “I don’t say you’re more minute--I say he’s more brilliant. Besides, as I’ve told you before, you’re not one of us.” With which, as a check to further discussion, she went straight on to Mr. Longdon: “The point about Aggie’s conservative education is the wonderful sincerity with which the Duchess feels that one’s girl may so perfectly and consistently be hedged in without one’s really ever (for it comes to that) depriving one’s own self--” “Well, of what?” Mr. Longdon boldly demanded while his hostess appeared thoughtfully to falter. She addressed herself mutely to Vanderbank, in whom the movement produced a laugh. “I defy you,” he exclaimed, “to say!” “Well, you don’t defy ME!” Mr. Cashmore cried as Mrs. Brook failed to take up the challenge. “If you know Mitchy,” he went on to Mr. Longdon, “you must know Petherton.” The elder man remained vague and not imperceptibly cold. “Petherton?” “My brother-in-law--whom, God knows why, Mitchy runs.” “Runs?” Mr. Longdon again echoed. Mrs. Brook appealed afresh to Vanderbank. “I think we ought to spare him. I may not remind you of mamma,” she continued to their companion, “but I hope you don’t mind my saying how much you remind me. Explanations, after all, spoil things, and if you CAN make anything of us and will sometimes come back you’ll find everything in its native freshness. You’ll see, you’ll feel for yourself.” Mr. Longdon stood before her and raised to Vanderbank, when she had ceased, the eyes he had attached to the carpet while she talked. “And must I go now?” Explanations, she had said, spoiled things, but he might have been a stranger at an Eastern court--comically helpless without his interpreter.