called it, into the house. “You’ve been thinking of yourself,” Vanderbank asked, “as a mere clerk at a salary, and you now find that you’re a partner and have a share in the concern?” “It seems to be something like that. But doesn’t a partner put in something? What have I put in?” “Well--ME, for one thing. Isn’t it your being here that has brought me down?” “Do you mean you wouldn’t have come for him alone? Then don’t you make anything of his attraction? You ought to,” said Nanda, “when he likes you so.” Vanderbank, longing for a river, was in white flannels, and he took her question with a happy laugh, a handsome face of good humour that completed the effect of his long, cool fairness. “Do you mind my just sitting still, do you mind letting me smoke and staying with me a while? Perhaps after a little we’ll walk about--shan’t we? But face to face with this dear old house, in this jolly old nook, one’s too contented to move, lest raising a finger even should break the spell. What WILL be perfect will be your just sitting down--DO sit down--and scolding me a little. That, my dear Nanda, will deepen the peace.” Some minutes later, while, near him but in another chair, she fingered the impossible book, as she pronounced it, that she had taken from him, he came back to what she had last said. “Has he talked to you much about his ‘liking’ me?” Nanda waited a minute, turning over the book. “No.” “Then how are you just now so struck with it?” “I’m not struck only with what I’m talked to about. I don’t know,” she went on, “only what people tell me.” “Ah no--you’re too much your mother’s daughter for that!” Vanderbank leaned back and smoked, and though all his air seemed to say that when one was so at ease for gossip almost any subject would do, he kept jogging his foot with the same small nervous motion as during the half-hour at Mertle that this record has commemorated. “You’re too much one of us all,” he continued. “We’ve tremendous perceptions,” he laughed. “Of course I SHOULD have come for him. But after all,” he added, as if all sorts of nonsense would equally serve, “he mightn’t, except for you, you know, have asked me.” Nanda so far accepted this view as to reply: “That’s awfully weak. He’s so modest that he might have been afraid of your boring yourself.” “That’s just what I mean.” “Well, if you do,” Nanda returned, “the explanation’s a little conceited.”