He quickly pulled himself round. “Well, he was, after a long absence, here a while since as if expressly to see her. But after spending half an hour he went away without it.”
Mr. Longdon’s watch continued. “He spent the half-hour with her mother instead?”
“Oh ‘instead’—it was hardly that. He at all events dropped his idea.”
“And what had it been, his idea?”
“You speak as if he had as many as I!” Mitchy replied. “In a manner indeed he has,” he continued as if for himself. “But they’re of a different kind,” he said to Mr. Longdon.
“What had it been, his idea?” the old man, however, simply repeated.
Mitchy’s confession at this seemed to explain his previous evasion. “We shall never know.”
Mr. Longdon hesitated. “He won’t tell YOU?”
“Me?” Mitchy had a pause. “Less than any one.”
Many things they had not spoken had already passed between them, and something evidently, to the sense of each, passed during the moment that followed this. “While you were abroad,” Mr. Longdon presently asked, “did you hear from him?”