Well, that it WAS the right tone a single little minute was sufficient to prove--a minute, I must yet haste to say, big enough in spite of its smallness to contain the longest look on any occasion exchanged between these friends. It was one of those looks--not so frequent, it must be admitted, as the muse of history, dealing at best in short cuts, is often by the conditions of her trade reduced to representing them--which after they have come and gone are felt not only to have changed relations but absolutely to have cleared the air. It certainly helped Vanderbank to find his answer. “I’m only afraid, I think, of your conscience.” He had been indeed for the space more helped than she. “My conscience?” “Think it over--quite at your leisure--and some day you’ll understand. There’s no hurry,” he continued--“no hurry. And when you do understand, it needn’t make your existence a burden to you to fancy you must tell me.” Oh he was so kind--kinder than ever now. “The thing is, you see, that _I_ haven’t a conscience. I only want my fun.” They had on this a second look, also decidedly comfortable, though discounted, as the phrase is, by the other, which had really in its way exhausted the possibilities of looks. “Oh I want MY fun too,” said Nanda, “and little as it may strike you in some ways as looking like it, just this, I beg you to believe, is the real thing. What’s at the bottom of it,” she went on, “is a talk I had not long ago with mother.” “Oh yes,” Van returned with brightly blushing interest. “The fun,” he laughed, “that’s to be got out of ‘mother’!” “Oh I’m not thinking so much of that. I’m thinking of any that she herself may be still in a position to pick up. Mine now, don’t you see? is in making out how I can manage for this. Of course it’s rather difficult,” the girl pursued, “for me to tell you exactly what I mean.” “Oh but it isn’t a bit difficult for me to understand you!” Vanderbank spoke, in his geniality, as if this were in fact the veriest trifle. “You’ve got your mother on your mind. That’s very much what I mean by your conscience.” Nanda had a fresh hesitation, but evidently unaccompanied at present by any pain. “Don’t you still LIKE mamma?” she at any rate quite successfully brought out. “I must tell you,” she quickly subjoined, “that though I’ve mentioned my talk with her as having finally led to my writing to you, it isn’t in the least that she then suggested my putting you the question. I put it,” she explained, “quite off my own bat.” The explanation, as an effect immediately produced, did proportionately much for the visitor, who sat back in his chair with a pleased--a distinctly exhilarated--sense both of what he himself and what Nanda had done. “You’re an adorable family!”