The Duchess, at this, fairly swelled with her happy stare. “Then it IS an adoption?” She forbore to press, however; she only went on: “It isn’t a question, my dear man, of what _I_ call it. YOU don’t make love to her.” “Dear me,” said Mr. Longdon, “what would she have had?” “That could be more charming, you mean, than your famous ‘loyalty’? Oh, caro mio, she wants it straighter! But I shock you,” his companion quickly added. The manner in which he firmly rose was scarce a denial; yet he stood for a moment in place. “What after all can she do?” “She can KEEP Mr. Van.” Mr. Longdon wondered. “Where?” “I mean till it’s too late. She can work on him.” “But how?” Covertly again the Duchess had followed the effect of her friend’s perceived movement on Mrs. Brook, who also got up. She gave a rap with her fan on his leg. “Sit down--you’ll see.” III He mechanically obeyed her although it happened to lend him the air of taking Mrs. Brook’s approach for a signal to resume his seat. She came over to them, Vanderbank followed, and it was without again moving, with a vague upward gape in fact from his place, that Mr. Longdon received as she stood before him a challenge of a sort to flash a point into what the Duchess had just said. “Why do you hate me so?” Vanderbank, who, beside Mrs. Brook, looked at him with attention, might have suspected him of turning a trifle pale; though even Vanderbank, with reasons of his own for an observation of the sharpest, could scarce have read into the matter the particular dim vision that would have accounted for it--the flicker of fear of what Mrs. Brook, whether as daughter or as mother, was at last so strangely and differently to show herself. “I should warn you, sir,” the young man threw off, “how little we consider that--in Buckingham Crescent certainly--a fair question. It isn’t playing the game--it’s hitting below the belt. We hate and we love--the latter especially; but to tell each other why is to break that little tacit rule of finding out for ourselves which is the delight of our lives and the source of our triumphs. You can say, you know, if you like, but you’re not obliged.” Mr. Longdon transferred to him something of the same colder apprehension, looking at him manifestly harder than ever before and finding in his eyes also no doubt a consciousness more charged. He presently got up, but, without answering Vanderbank, fixed again Mrs. Brook, to whom he echoed without expression: “Hate you?” The next moment, while he remained in presence with Vanderbank, Mrs. Brook was pointing out her meaning to him from the cushioned corner he had quitted. “Why, when you come back to town you come straight, as it were, here.” “Ah what’s that,” the Duchess asked in his interest, “but to follow Nanda as closely as possible, or at any rate to keep well with her?”