“I would never, last year, have gone to stay with you.”
“Thank you!” Mitchy laughed.
“Though I like you also—and extremely,” Mr. Longdon gravely pursued, “for yourself.”
Mitchy made a sign of acknowledgement. “You like me better for HER than you do for anybody else BUT myself.”
“You put it, I think, correctly. Of course I’ve not seen so much of Nanda—if between my age and hers, that is, any real contact is possible—without knowing that she now regards you as one of the very best of her friends, treating you, I find myself suspecting, with a degree of confidence—”
Mitchy gave a laugh of interruption. “That she doesn’t show even to you?”
Mr. Longdon’s poised glasses faced him. “Even! I don’t mind, as the opportunity has come up, telling you frankly—and as from my time of life to your own—all the comfort I take in the sense that in any case of need or trouble she might look to you for whatever advice or support the crisis should demand.”
“She has told you she feels I’d be there?” Mitchy after an instant asked.
“I’m not sure,” his friend replied, “that I ought quite to mention anything she has ‘told’ me. I speak of what I’ve made out myself.”
“Then I thank you more than I can say for your penetration. Her mother, I should let you know,” Mitchy continued, “is with her just now.”