It was a business sometimes really to hold her eyes, but they had, it must be said for her, their steady moments. She exchanged with Vanderbank a somewhat remarkable look, then, with an art of her own, broke short off without appearing to drop him. “The thing is, don’t you think?”--she appealed to Mitchy--“for us not to be so awfully clever as to make it believed that we can never be simple. We mustn’t see TOO tremendous things--even in each other.” She quite lost patience with the danger she glanced at. “We CAN be simple!” “We CAN, by God!” Mitchy laughed. “Well, we are now--and it’s a great comfort to have it settled,” said Vanderbank. “Then you see,” Mrs. Brook returned, “what a mistake you’d make to see abysses of subtlety in my having been merely natural.” “We CAN be natural,” Mitchy declared. “We can, by God!” Vanderbank laughed. Mrs. Brook had turned to Mitchy. “I just wanted you to know. So I spoke. It’s not more complicated than that. As for WHY I wanted you to know--!” “What better reason could there be,” Mitchy interrupted, “than your being filled to the finger-tips with the sense of how I would want it myself, and of the misery, the absolute pathos, of my being left out? Fancy, my dear chap”--he had only to put it to Van--“my NOT knowing!”. Vanderbank evidently couldn’t fancy it, but he said quietly enough: “I should have told you myself.” “Well, what’s the difference?” “Oh there IS a difference,” Mrs. Brook loyally said. Then she opened an inch or two, for Vanderbank, the door of her dim radiance. “Only I should have thought it a difference for the better. Of course,” she added, “it remains absolutely with us three alone, and don’t you already feel from it the fresh charm--with it here between us--of our being together?” It was as if each of the men had waited for the other to assent better than he himself could and Mitchy then, as Vanderbank failed, had gracefully, to cover him, changed the subject. “But isn’t Nanda, the person most interested, to know?” Vanderbank gave on this a strange sound of hilarity. “Ah that would finish it off!” It produced for a few seconds something like a chill, a chill that had for consequence a momentary pause which in its turn added weight to the words next uttered. “It’s not I who shall tell her,” Mrs. Brook said gently and gravely. “There!--you may be sure. If you want a promise, it’s a promise. So that if Mr. Longdon’s silent,” she went on, “and you are, Mitchy, and I am, how in the world shall she have a suspicion?” “You mean of course except by Van’s deciding to mention it himself.” Van might have been, from the way they looked at him, some beautiful unconscious object; but Mrs. Brook was quite ready to answer. “Oh poor man, HE’LL never breathe.” “I see. So there we are.”