It arrested Mitchy, but his ingenuity could only rebound. “In ONE way: that of reducing us to feel that the desire to ‘make up’ to her is--well, mainly for OUR relief. If she ‘trusts’ us, as I said just now, it isn’t for THAT she does so.” As his friend appeared to wait then to hear, it was presently with positive joy that he showed he could meet the last difficulty. “What she trusts us to do”--oh Mitchy had worked it out!--“is to let HIM off.” “Let him off?” It still left Mr. Longdon dim. “Easily. That’s all.” “But what would letting him off hard be? It seems to me he’s--on any terms--already beyond us. He IS off.” Mr. Longdon had given it a sound that suddenly made Mitchy appear to collapse under a sharper sense of the matter. “He IS off,” he moodily echoed. His companion, again a little bewildered, watched him; then with impatience: “Do, please, tell me what has happened.” He quickly pulled himself round. “Well, he was, after a long absence, here a while since as if expressly to see her. But after spending half an hour he went away without it.” Mr. Longdon’s watch continued. “He spent the half-hour with her mother instead?” “Oh ‘instead’--it was hardly that. He at all events dropped his idea.” “And what had it been, his idea?” “You speak as if he had as many as I!” Mitchy replied. “In a manner indeed he has,” he continued as if for himself. “But they’re of a different kind,” he said to Mr. Longdon. “What had it been, his idea?” the old man, however, simply repeated. Mitchy’s confession at this seemed to explain his previous evasion. “We shall never know.” Mr. Longdon hesitated. “He won’t tell YOU?” “Me?” Mitchy had a pause. “Less than any one.” Many things they had not spoken had already passed between them, and something evidently, to the sense of each, passed during the moment that followed this. “While you were abroad,” Mr. Longdon presently asked, “did you hear from him?” “Never. And I wrote nothing.” “Like me,” said Mr. Longdon. “I’ve neither written nor heard.” “Ah but with you it will be different.” Mr. Longdon, as if with the outbreak of an agitation hitherto controlled, had turned abruptly away and, with the usual swing of his glass, begun almost wildly to wander. “You WILL hear.” “I shall be curious.” “Oh but what Nanda wants, you know, is that you shouldn’t be too much so.” Mr. Longdon thoughtfully rambled. “Too much--?” “To let him off, as we were saying, easily.” The elder man for a while said nothing more, but he at last came back. “She’d like me actually to give him something?” “I dare say!” “Money?” Mitchy smiled. “A handsome present.” They were face to face again with more mute interchange. “She doesn’t want HIM to have lost--!” Mr. Longdon, however, on this, once more broke off while Mitchy’s eyes followed him. “Doesn’t it give a sort of measure of what she may feel--?”