Her visitor had dropped on a sofa where, propped by the back, he sat rather upright, his glasses on his nose, his hands in his pockets and his elbows much turned out. “Mitchy left you more than ten minutes ago, and yet your state on his departure remains such that there could be a bustle of servants in the room without your being aware? Kindly give me a lead then as to what it is he has done to you.”
She hovered before him with her obscure smile. “You see it for yourself.”
He shook his head with decision. “I don’t see anything for myself, and I beg you to understand that it’s not what I’ve come here to-day to do. Anything I may yet see which I don’t already see will be only, I warn you, so far as you shall make it very clear. There—you’ve work cut out. And is it with Mr. Mitchett, may I ask, that you’ve been, as you mention, cutting it?”
Nanda looked about her as if weighing many things; after which her eyes came back to him. “Do you mind if I don’t sit down?”
“I don’t mind if you stand on your head—at the pass we’ve come to.”
“I shall not try your patience,” the girl good-humouredly replied, “so far as that. I only want you not to be worried if I walk about a little.”
Mr. Longdon, without a movement, kept his posture. “Oh I can’t oblige you there. I SHALL be worried. I’ve come on purpose to be worried, and the more I surrender myself to the rack the more, I seem to feel, we shall have threshed our business out. So you may dance, you may stamp, if you like, on the absolutely passive thing you’ve made of me.”
“Well, what I HAVE had from Mitchy,” she cheerfully responded, “is practically a lesson in dancing: by which I perhaps mean rather a lesson in sitting, myself, as I want you to do while I talk, as still as a mouse. They take,” she declared, “while THEY talk, an amount of exercise!”
“They?” Mr. Longdon wondered. “Was his wife with him?”
“Dear no—he and Mr. Van.”