What he might have replied remained in the air, for the door opened so exactly at the moment she spoke that he rose again with a start and the butler, coming in, received her enquiry full in the face. This functionary’s answer to it, however, had no more than the usual austerity. “Mr. Vanderbank and Mr. Longdon.” These visitors took a minute to appear, and Mrs. Brook, not stirring--still only looking from the sofa calmly up at Mr. Cashmore--used the time, it might have seemed, for correcting any impression of undue levity made by her recent question. “Where did you last meet Nanda?” He glanced at the door to see if he were heard. “At the Grendons’.” “So you do go there?” “I went over from Hicks the other day for an hour.” “And Carrie was there?” “Yes. It was a dreadful horrid bore. But I talked only to your daughter.” She got up--the others were at hand--and offered Mr. Cashmore an expression that might have struck him as strange. “It’s serious.” “Serious?”--he had no eyes for the others. “She didn’t tell me.” He gave a sound, controlled by discretion, which sufficed none the less to make Mr. Longdon--beholding him for the first time--receive it with a little of the stiffness of a person greeted with a guffaw. Mr. Cashmore visibly liked this silence of Nanda’s about their meeting. II Mrs. Brookenham, who had introduced him to the elder of her visitors, had also found in serving these gentlemen with tea, a chance to edge at him with an intensity not to be resisted: “Talk to Mr. Longdon--take him off THERE.” She had indicated the sofa at the opposite end of the room and had set him an example by possessing herself, in the place she already occupied, of her “adored” Vanderbank. This arrangement, however, constituted for her, in her own corner, as soon as she had made it, the ground of an appeal. “Will he hate me any worse for doing that?” Vanderbank glanced at the others. “Will Cashmore, do you mean?” “Dear no--I don’t care whom HE hates. But with Mr. Longdon I want to avoid mistakes.” “Then don’t try quite so hard!” Vanderbank laughed. “Is that your reason for throwing him into Cashmore’s arms?” “Yes, precisely--so that I shall have these few moments to ask you for directions: you must know him by this time so well. I only want, heaven help me, to be as nice to him as I possibly can.” “That’s quite the best thing for you and altogether why, this afternoon, I brought him: he might have better luck in finding you--it was he who suggested it--than he has had by himself. I’m in a general way,” Vanderbank added, “watching over him.” “I see--and he’s watching over you.” Mrs. Brook’s sweet vacancy had already taken in so much. “He wants to judge of what I may be doing to you--he wants to save you from me. He quite detests me.” Vanderbank, with the interest as well as the amusement, fairly threw himself back. “There’s nobody like you--you’re too magnificent!”