“Oh!” said her visitor.
“He has been worse to her than to you,” she continued. “But he’ll make it all right.”
Mr. Longdon’s attention retained its grimness. “If he has such a remedy for the more then, what has he for the less?”
Nanda, however, was but for an instant checked.
“Oh it’s I who make it up to YOU. To mother, you see, there’s no one otherwise to make it up.”
This at first unmistakeably sounded to him too complicated for acceptance. But his face changed as light dawned. “That puts it then that you WILL come?”
“I’ll come if you’ll take me as I am—which is what I must previously explain to you: I mean more than I’ve ever done before. But what HE means by what you call his remedy is my making you feel better about himself.”
The old man gazed at her. “‘Your’ doing it is too beautiful! And he could really come to you for the purpose of asking you?”
“Oh no,” said the girl briskly, “he came simply for the purpose of doing what he HAD to do. After my letter how could he not come? Then he met most kindly what I said to him for mother and what he quite understood to be all my business with him; so that his appeal to me to plead with you for—well, for his credit—was only thrown in because he had so good a chance.”
This speech brought Mr. Longdon abruptly to his feet, but before she could warn him again of the patience she continued to need he had already, as if what she evoked for him left him too stupefied, dropped back into submission. “The man stood there for you to render him a service?—for you to help him and praise him?”