THE AWKWARD AGE
care," she added, "he needn't come up. He can straight to Nanda."
Mitchy had turned away again as with the impulse of hiding the tears that had risen and that had not wholly disappeared even by the time he faced about. "Did Nanda know he was to come?"
"Mr. Longdon?"
"No, no. Was she expecting Van—?"
"My dear man," Mrs. Brook mildly wailed, "when can she have not been?"
Mitchy looked hard for an instant at the floor. "I mean does she know he has been and gone?"
Mrs. Brook, from where she stood and through the window, looked rather at the sky. "Her father will have told her."
"Her father?" Mitchy frankly wondered. "Is he in it?"
Mrs. Brook, at this, had a longer pause. "You assume, I suppose, Mitchy dear," she then quavered, "that I put him up—"
"Put Edward up?" he broke in.
"No—that of course. Put Van up to ideas—"
He caught it again. "About me—what you call his suspicions?" He seemed to weigh the charge, but it ended, while he passed his hand hard over his eyes, in weariness and in the nearest approach to coldness he had ever shown Mrs. Brook. "It doesn't matter. It's every one's fate to be, in one way or another, the subject of ideas. Do then," he continued, "let Mr. Longdon come up."
She instantly rang the bell. "Then I'll go to Nanda. But don't look frightened," she added as she came back, "as to what we may—Edward or I—do next. It's only to tell her that he'll be with her."
"Good. I'll tell Tatton," Mitchy replied.
Still, however, she lingered. "Shall you ever care for me more?"
396
