“Well,” he returned, “I felt half an hour ago that, near as I was to relief, I could keep it up no longer; so that though I knew it would bring me much too soon I started at six sharp for our trysting-place.”
“And I’ve no tea, after all, to reward you!” It was but now clearly that she noticed it. “They must have removed the things without my heeding.”
Her old friend looked at her with some intensity. “Were you in the room?”
“Yes—but I didn’t see the man come in.”
“What then were you doing?”
Nanda thought; her smile was as usual the faintest discernible outward sign. “Thinking of YOU.”
“So tremendously hard?”
“Well, of other things too and of other persons. Of everything really that in our last talk I told you I felt I must have out with myself before meeting you for what I suppose you’ve now in mind.”
Mr. Longdon had kept his eyes on her, but at this he turned away; not, however, for an alternative, embracing her material situation with the embarrassed optimism of Vanderbank or the mitigated gloom of Mitchy. “Ah”—he took her up with some dryness—“you’ve been having things out with yourself?” But he went on before she answered: “I don’t want any tea, thank you. I found myself, after five, in such a fidget that I went three times in the course of the hour to my club, where I’ve the impression I each time had it. I dare say it wasn’t there, though, I did have it,” he after an instant pursued, “for I’ve somehow a confused image of a shop in Oxford Street—or was it rather in Regent?—into which I gloomily wandered to beguile the moments with a mixture that if I strike you as upset I beg you to set it all down to. Do you know in fact what I’ve been doing for the last ten minutes? Roaming hither and thither in your beautiful Crescent till I could venture to come in.”
“Then did you see Mitchy go out? But no, you wouldn’t”—Nanda corrected herself. “He has been gone longer than that.”