At this she again looked at him. “Do you mention her as a way of alluding to something you guess she must have told me?” “That I’ve always supposed I make your flesh creep? Yes,” Mitchy admitted; “I see she must have said to you: ‘Be nice to him, to show him it isn’t quite so bad as that!’ So you ARE nice--so you always WILL be nice. But I adore you, all the same, without illusions.” She had opened at one of the tables, unperceivingly, a big volume of which she turned the leaves. “Don’t ‘adore’ a girl, Mr. Mitchy--just help her. That’s more to the purpose.” “Help you?” he cried. “You bring tears to my eyes!” “Can’t a girl have friends?” she went on. “I never heard of anything so idiotic.” Giving him, however, no chance to take her up on this, she made a quick transition. “Mother didn’t come because she wants me now, as she says, more to share her own life.” Mitchy looked at it. “But is this the way for her to share yours?” “Ah that’s another matter--about which you must talk to HER. She wants me no longer to keep seeing only with her eyes. She’s throwing me into the world.” Mitchy had listened with the liveliest interest, but he presently broke into a laugh. “What a good thing then that I’m there to catch you!” Without--it might have been seen--having gathered the smallest impression of what they enclosed, she carefully drew together again the covers of her folio. There was deliberation in her movements. “I shall always be glad when you’re there. But where do you suppose they’ve gone?” Her eyes were on what was visible of the other room, from which there arrived no sound of voices. “They’re off there,” said Mitchy, “but just looking unutterable things about you. The impression’s too deep. Let them look, and tell me meanwhile if Mrs. Donner gave you my message.” “Oh yes, she told me some humbug.” “The humbug then was in the tone my perfectly sincere speech took from herself. She gives things, I recognise, rather that sound. It’s her weakness,” he continued, “and perhaps even one may say her danger. All the more reason you should help her, as I believe you’re supposed to be doing, aren’t you? I hope you feel you are,” he earnestly added. He had spoken this time gravely enough, and with magnificent gravity Nanda replied. “I HAVE helped her. Tishy’s sure I have. That’s what Tishy wants me for. She says that to be with some nice girl’s really the best thing for her.” Poor Mitchy’s face hereupon would have been interesting, would have been distinctly touching to other eyes; but Nanda’s were not heedful of it. “Oh,” he returned after an instant and without profane mirth, “that seems to me the best thing for any one.” Vanderbank, however, might have caught his expression, for Vanderbank now reappeared, smiling on the pair as if struck by their intimacy. “How you ARE keeping it up!” Then to Nanda persuasively: “Do you mind going to him in there? I want him so really to see you. It’s quite, you know, what he came for.”