The clear sincerity of this, even had there been nothing else, imposed a consideration that Mitchy now flagrantly could give, and the deference of his suggestion of difficulty only grew more deep. “I’m to do then, with this happy condition of hers, what you say YOU’VE done--to ‘try’ it?” And then as her assent, so directly challenged, failed an instant: “But won’t my approach to it, however cautious, be just what will break it up and spoil it?” Nanda thought. “Why so--if mine wasn’t?” “Oh you’re not me!” “But I’m just as bad.” “Thank you, my dear!” Mitchy rang out. “Without,” Nanda pursued, “being as good.” She had on this, in a different key, her own sudden explosion. “Don’t you see, Mitchy dear--for the very heart of it all--how good I BELIEVE you?” She had spoken as with a flare of impatience at some justice he failed to do her, and this brought him after a startled instant close enough to her to take up her hand. She let him have it, and in mute solemn reassurance he raised it to his lips, saying to her thus more things than he could say in any other way; which yet just after, when he had released it and a motionless pause had ensued, didn’t prevent his adding three words. “Oh Nanda, Nanda!” The tone of them made her again extraordinarily gentle. “Don’t ‘try’ anything then. Take everything for granted.” He had turned away from her and walked mechanically, with his air of blind emotion, to the window, where for a minute he looked out. “It has stopped raining,” he said at last; “it’s going to brighten.” The place had three windows, and Nanda went to the next. “Not quite yet--but I think it will.” Mitchy soon faced back into the room, where after a brief hesitation he moved, as quietly, almost as cautiously, as if on tiptoe, to the seat occupied by his companion at the beginning of their talk. Here he sank down watching the girl, who stood a while longer with her eyes on the garden. “You want me, you say, to take her out of the Duchess’s life; but where am I myself, if we come to that, but even more IN the Duchess’s life than Aggie is? I’m in it by my contacts, my associations, my indifferences--all my acceptances, knowledges, amusements. I’m in it by my cynicisms--those that circumstances somehow from the first, when I began for myself to look at life and the world, committed me to and steeped me in; I’m in it by a kind of desperation that I shouldn’t have felt perhaps if you had got hold of me sooner with just this touch with which you’ve got hold of me to-day; and I’m in it more than all--you’ll yourself admit--by the very fact that her aunt desires, as you know, much more even than you do, to bring the thing about. Then we SHOULD be--the Duchess and I--shoulder to shoulder!” Nanda heard him motionless to the end, taking also another minute to turn over what he had said. “What is it you like so in Lord Petherton?” she asked as she came to him.