may to-day be between you and Mr. Longdon. Do I understand,” Mitchy asked, “that he’s presently to arrive for an answer to something he has put to you?” Nanda looked at him a while with a sort of solemnity of tenderness, and her voice, when she at last spoke, trembled with a feeling that clearly had grown in her as she listened to the string of whimsicalities, bitter and sweet, that he had just unrolled. “You’re wild,” she said simply--“you’re wild.” He wonderfully glared. “Am I then already frightening you?” He shook his head rather sadly. “I’m not in the least trying yet. There’s something,” he added after an instant, “that I do want too awfully to ask you.” “Well then--!” If she had not eagerness she had at least charity. “Oh but you see I reflect that though you show all the courage to go to the roots and depths with ME, I’m not--I never have been--fully conscious of the nerve for doing as much with you. It’s a question,” Mitchy explained, “of how much--of a particular matter--you know.” She continued ever so kindly to face him. “Hasn’t it come out all round now that I know everything?” Her reply, in this form, took a minute or two to operate, but when it began to do so it fairly diffused a light. Mitchy’s face turned of a colour that might have been produced by her holding close to it some lantern wonderfully glazed. “You know, you know!” he then rang out. “Of course I know.” “You know, you know!” Mitchy repeated. “Everything,” she imperturbably went on, “but what you’re talking about.” He was silent a little, his eyes on her. “May I kiss your hand?” “No,” she answered: “that’s what I call wild.” He had risen with his question and after her reply he remained a moment on the spot. “See--I’ve frightened you. It proves as easy as that. But I only wanted to show you and to be sure for myself. Now that I’ve the mental certitude I shall never wish otherwise to use it.” He turned away to begin again one of his absorbed revolutions. “Mr. Longdon has asked you this time for a grand public adhesion, and what he turns up for now is to receive your ultimatum? A final irrevocable flight with him is the line he advises, so that he’ll be ready for it on the spot with the post-chaise and the pistols?” The image appeared really to have for Nanda a certain vividness, and she looked at it a space without a hint of a smile. “We shan’t need any pistols, whatever may be decided about the post-chaise; and any flight we may undertake together will need no cover of secrecy or night. Mother, as I’ve told you--” “Won’t fling herself across your reckless path? I remember,” said Mitchy--“you alluded to her magnificent resignation. But father?” he oddly demanded. Nanda thought for this a moment longer. “Well, Mr. Longdon has--off in the country--a good deal of shooting.”