“The only thing that remains to me in life,” he answered, “is a certain accessibility to the thought of what I may still do to figure a little in your eye; but that’s precisely a thought you may assist to become clearer. You may for instance give me some pledge or sign that if I do figure--prance and caracole and sufficiently kick up the dust--your eye won’t suffer itself to be distracted from me. I think there’s no adventure I’m not ready to undertake for you; yet my passion--chastened, through all this, purified, austere--is still enough of this world not wholly to have renounced the fancy of some small reward.” “How small?” the girl asked. She spoke as if feeling she must take from him in common kindness at least as much as she would make him take, and the serious anxious patience such a consciousness gave her tone was met by Mitchy with a charmed reasonableness that his habit of hyperbole did nothing to misrepresent. He glowed at her with the fullest recognition that there was something he was there to discuss with her, but with the assurance in every soft sound of him that no height to which she might lift the discussion would be too great for him to reach. His every cadence and every motion was an implication, as from one to the other, of the exquisite. Oh he could sustain it! “Well, I mean the establishment of something between us. I mean your arranging somehow that we shall be drawn more together--know together something nobody else knows. I should like so terrifically to have a RELATION that is a secret, with you.” “Oh if that’s all you want you can be easily gratified. Rien de plus facile, as mamma says. I’m full of secrets--I think I’m really most secretive. I’ll share almost any one of them with you--if it’s only a good one.” Mitchy debated. “You mean you’ll choose it yourself? You won’t let it be one of mine?” Nanda wondered. “But what’s the difference?” Her companion jumped up again and for a moment pervaded the place. “When you say such things as that, you’re of a beauty--! MAY it,” he asked as he stopped before her, “be one of mine--a perfectly awful one?” She showed her clearest interest. “As I suppose the most awful secrets are the best--yes, certainly.” “I’m hideously tempted.” But he hung fire; then dropping into his chair again: “It would be too bad. I’m afraid I can’t.” “Then why won’t THIS do, just as it is?” “‘This’?” He looked over the big bland room. “Which?” “Why what you’re here for?” “My dear child I’m here--most of all--to love you more than ever; and there’s an absence of favouring mystery about THAT--!” She looked at him as if seeing what he meant and only asking to remedy it. “There’s a certain amount of mystery we can now MAKE--that it strikes me in fact we MUST make. Dear Mitchy,” she continued almost with eagerness, “I don’t think we CAN really tell.”