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.