Mitchy debated. “You mean you’ll choose it yourself? You won’t let it be one of mine?”
Nanda wondered. “But what’s the difference?”
Her companion jumped up again and for a moment pervaded the place. “When you say such things as that, you’re of a beauty--! MAY it,” he asked as he stopped before her, “be one of mine--a perfectly awful one?”
She showed her clearest interest. “As I suppose the most awful secrets are the best--yes, certainly.”
“I’m hideously tempted.” But he hung fire; then dropping into his chair again: “It would be too bad. I’m afraid I can’t.”
“‘This’?” He looked over the big bland room. “Which?”
“My dear child I’m here--most of all--to love you more than ever; and there’s an absence of favouring mystery about THAT--!” She looked at him as if seeing what he meant and only asking to remedy it. “There’s a certain amount of mystery we can now MAKE--that it strikes me in fact we MUST make. Dear Mitchy,” she continued almost with eagerness, “I don’t think we CAN really tell.”
He had fallen back in his chair, not looking at her now, and with his hands, from his supported elbows, clasped to keep himself more quiet. “Are you still talking about Aggie?”
“Oh!” It was not irritation he appeared to express, but the slight strain of an effort to get into relation with the subject. Better to focus the image he closed his eyes a while.
“You speak of something that may draw us together, and I simply reply that if you don’t feel how near together we are--in this I shouldn’t imagine you ever would. You must have wonderful notions,” she presently went on, “of the ideal state of union. I pack every one off for you--I banish everything that can interfere, and I don’t in the least mind your knowing that I find the consequence delightful. YOU may talk, if you like, of what will have passed between us, but I shall never mention it to a soul; literally not to a living creature. What do you want more than that?” He opened his eyes in deference to the question, but replied only with a gaze as unassisted as if it had come through a hole in a curtain. “You say you’re ready for an adventure, and it’s just an adventure that I propose. If I can make you feel for yourself as I feel for you the beauty of your chance to go in and save her--!”