She gave a small gasp. “His own mother wouldn’t—?”
His headshake just failed of sharpness. “No, nor he her. There’s a link missing.” Then as if after all she might take him too seriously, “Of course it’s I,” he more gently moralised, “who have lost the link in my sleep. I’ve slept half the century—I’m Rip Van Winkle.” He went back after a moment to her question. “He’s not at any rate like his mother.”
She turned it over. “Perhaps you wouldn’t think so much of her now.”
“Perhaps not. At all events my snatching you from Mr. Vanderbank was my own idea.”
“I wasn’t thinking,” Nanda said, “of your snatching me. I was thinking of your snatching yourself.”
“I might have sent YOU to the house? Well,” Mr. Longdon replied, “I find I take more and more the economical view of my pleasures. I run them less and less together. I get all I can out of each.”
“So now you’re getting all you can out of ME?”
“All I can, my dear—all I can.” He watched a little the flushed distance, then mildly broke out: “It IS, as you said just now, exciting! But it makes me”—and he became abrupt again—“want you, as I’ve already told you, to come to MY place. Not, however, that we may be still more mad together.”
The girl shared from the bench his contemplation. “Do you call THIS madness?”
Well, he rather stuck to it. “You spoke of it yourself as excitement. You’ll make of course one of your fine distinctions, but I take it in my rough way as a whirl. We’re going round and round.” In a minute he had folded his arms with the same closeness Vanderbank had used—in a minute he too was nervously shaking his foot. “Steady, steady; if we sit close we shall see it through. But come down to Suffolk for sanity.”