“Why, for what we were speaking of just now--my being to-day so in everything and squeezing up and down no matter whose staircase. Isn’t it one crowded hour of glorious life?” she asked. “What preceded it was an age, no doubt--but an age without a name.” Vanderbank watched her a little in silence, then spoke quite beside the question. “It’s astonishing how at moments you remind me of your mother!” At this she got up. “Ah there it is! It’s what I shall never shake off. That, I imagine, is what Mr. Longdon feels.” Both on their feet now, as if ready for the others, they yet--and even a trifle awkwardly--lingered. It might in fact have appeared to a spectator that some climax had come, on the young man’s part, to some state of irresolution about the utterance of something. What were the words so repeatedly on his lips, yet so repeatedly not sounded? It would have struck our observer that they were probably not those his lips even now actually formed. “Doesn’t he perhaps talk to you too much about yourself?” Nanda gave him a dim smile, and he might indeed then have exclaimed on a certain resemblance, a resemblance of expression that had nothing to do with form. It wouldn’t have been diminished for him moreover by her successful suppression of every sign that she felt his question a little of a snub. The recall he had previously mentioned could, however, as she answered him, only have been brushed away by a supervening sense of his roughness. “It probably isn’t so much that as my own way of going on.” She spoke with a mildness that could scarce have been so full without being an effort. “Between his patience and my egotism anything’s possible. It isn’t his talking--it’s his listening.” She gave up the point, at any rate, as if from softness to her actual companion. “Wasn’t it you who spoke to mamma about my sitting with her? That’s what I mean by my debt to you. It’s through you that I’m always there--through you and perhaps a little through Mitchy.” “Oh through Mitchy--it MUST have been--more than through me.” Vanderbank spoke with the manner of humouring her about a trifle. “Mitchy, delightful man, felt on the subject of your eternal exile, I think, still more strongly.” They quitted their place together and at the end of a few steps became aware of the approach of one of the others, a figure but a few yards off, arriving from the quarter from which Nanda had come. “Ah Mr. Longdon!”--she spoke with eagerness now. Vanderbank instantly waved his hat. “Dear old boy!” “Between you all, at any rate,” she said more gaily, “you’ve brought me down.” Vanderbank made no answer till they met their friend, when, by way of greeting, he simply echoed her words. “Between us all, you’ll be glad to know, we’ve brought her down.” Mr. Longdon looked from one of them to the other. “Where have you been together?” Nanda was the first to respond. “Only talking--on a bench.” “Well, _I_ want to talk on a bench!” Their friend showed a spirit.