Mr. Longdon faced her, across his interval, with his original terror represented now only by such a lingering flush as might have formed a natural tribute to a brilliant scene. “I haven’t the glimmering of an idea of what you’d be at. But please understand,” he added, “that I don’t at all refuse you the private half-hour you referred to a while since.” “Are you really willing to put the child up for the rest of the year?” Edward placidly demanded, speaking as if quite unaware that anything else had taken place. His wife fixed her eyes on him. “The ingenuity of your companions, love, plays in the air like the lightning, but flashes round your head only, by good fortune, to leave it unscathed. Still, you have after all your own strange wit, and I’m not sure that any of ours ever compares with it. Only, confronted also with ours, how can poor Mr. Longdon really choose which of the two he’ll meet?” Poor Mr. Longdon now looked hard at Edward. “Oh Mr. Brookenham’s, I feel, any day. It’s even with YOU, I confess,” he said to him, “that I’d rather have that private half-hour.” “Done!” Mrs. Brook declared. “I’ll send him to you. But we HAVE, you know, as Van says, gone to pieces,” she went on, twisting her pretty head and tossing it back over her shoulder to an auditor of whose approach to her from behind, though it was impossible she should have seen him, she had visibly within a minute become aware. “It’s your marriage, Mitchy, that has darkened our old bright air, changed us more than we even yet know, and most grossly and horribly, my dear man, changed YOU. You steal up in a way that gives one the creeps, whereas in the good time that’s gone you always burst in with music and song. Go round where I can see you: I mayn’t love you now, but at least, I suppose, I may look at you. Direct your energies,” she pursued while Mitchy obeyed her, “as much as possible, please, against our uncanny chill. Pile on the fire and close up the ranks; this WAS our best hour, you know--and all the more that Tishy, I see, is getting rid of her superfluities. Here comes back old Van,” she wound up, “vanquished, I judge, in the attempt to divert Nanda from her prey. Won’t Nanda sit with poor US?” she asked of Vanderbank, who now, meeting Mitchy in range of the others, remained standing with him and as at her commands. “I didn’t of course ask her,” the young man replied. “Then what did you do?” “I only took a little walk.” Mrs. Brook, on this, was woeful at Mitchy. “See then what we’ve come to. When did we ever ‘walk’ in YOUR time save as a distinct part of the effect of our good things? Please return to Nanda,” she said to Vanderbank, “and tell her I particularly wish her to come in for this delightful evening’s end.”