The personage he so addressed was, as we know, nothing if not generally affable; yet if that was just then apparent it was through a shade of coolness for the slightly heated familiarity of so plain, or at least so free, a young man in eye-glasses, now for the first time definitely apprehended. "Oh, I've scarcely 'treasures'—but I've some things of interest."

Hugh, however, entering the opulent circle, as it were, clearly took account of no breath of a chill. "I think possible, my lord, that you've a great treasure—if you've really so high a rarity as a splendid Manto-vano."

"A 'Mantovano'?" You wouldn't have been sure that his lordship didn't pronounce the word for the first time in his life.

"There have been supposed to be only seven real examples about the world; so that if by an extraordinary chance you find yourself the possessor of a magnificent eighth——"

But Lord John had already broken in. "Why, there you are, Mr. Bender!"

"Oh, Mr. Bender, with whom I've made acquaintance," Hugh returned, "was there as it began to work in me—"

"That your Moretto, Lord Theign"—Mr. Bender took their informant up—"isn't, after all, a Moretto at all." And he continued amusedly to Hugh: "It began to work in you, sir, like very strong drink!"

"Do I understand you to suggest," Lord Theign asked of the startling young man, "that my precious picture isn't genuine?"

Well, Hugh knew exactly what he suggested. "As a picture, Lord Theign, as a great portrait, one of the most genuine things in Europe. But it strikes me as probable that from far back—for reasons!—there has been a wrong attribution; that the work has been, in other words, traditionally, obstinately miscalled. It has passed for a Moretto, and at first I quite took it for one; but I suddenly, as I looked and looked and saw and saw, began to doubt, and now I know why I doubted."

Lord Theign had during this speech kept his eyes on the ground; but he raised them to Mr. Crimble's almost palpitating presence for the remark: "I'm bound to say that I hope you've some very good grounds!"

"I've three or four, Lord Theign; they seem to me of the best—as yet. They made me wonder and wonder—and then light splendidly broke."

His lordship didn't stint his attention. "Reflected, you mean, from other Mantovanos—that I don't know?"

"I mean from those I know myself," said Hugh; "and I mean from fine analogies with one in particular."

"Analogies that in all these years, these centuries, have so remarkably not been noticed?"

"Well," Hugh competently explained, "they're a sort of thing the very sense of, the value and meaning of, are a highly modern—in fact a quite recent growth."

Lord John at this professed with cordiality that he at least quite understood. "Oh, we know a lot more about our pictures and things than ever our ancestors did!"

"Well, I guess it's enough for me," Mr. Bender contributed, "that your ancestors knew enough to get 'em!"

"Ah, that doesn't go so far," cried Hugh, "unless we ourselves know enough to keep 'em!"

The words appeared to quicken in a manner Lord Theign's view of the speaker. "Were your ancestors, Mr. Crimble, great collectors?"

Arrested, it might be, in his general assurance, Hugh wondered and smiled. "Mine—collectors? Oh, I'm afraid I haven't any—to speak of. Only it has seemed to me for a long time," he added, "that on that head we should all feel together."

Lord Theign looked for a moment as if these were rather large presumptions; then he put them in their place a little curtly. "It's one thing to keep our possessions for ourselves—it's another to keep them for other people."

"Well," Hugh good-humouredly returned, "I'm perhaps not so absolutely sure of myself, if you press me, as that I sha'n't be glad of a higher and wiser opinion—I mean than my own. It would be awfully interesting, if you'll allow me to say so, to have the judgment of one or two of the great men."

"You're not yourself, Mr. Crimble, one of the great men?" his host asked with tempered irony.

"Well, I guess he's going to be, anyhow," Mr. Bender cordially struck in; "and this remarkable exhibition of intelligence may just let him loose on the world, mayn't it?"

"Thank you, Mr. Bender!"—and Hugh obviously tried to look neither elated nor snubbed. "I've too much still to learn, but I'm learning every day, and I shall have learnt immensely this afternoon."

"Pretty well at my expense, however," Lord Theign laughed, "if you demolish a name we've held for generations so dear."

"You may have held the name dear, my lord," his young critic answered; "but my whole point is that, if I'm right, you've held the picture itself cheap."

"Because a Mantovano," said Lord John, "is so much greater a value?"

Hugh met his eyes a moment "Are you talking of values pecuniary?"

"What values are not pecuniary?"

Hugh might, during his hesitation, have been imagined to stand off a little from the question. "Well, some things have in a higher degree that one, and some have the associational or the factitious, and some the clear artistic."

"And some," Mr. Bender opined, "have them all—in the highest degree. But what you mean," he went on, "is that a Mantovano would come higher under the hammer than a Moretto?"

"Why, sir," the young man returned, "there aren't any, as I've just stated, to 'come.' I account—or I easily can—for every one of the very small number."

"Then do you consider that you account for this one?"

"I believe I shall if you'll give me time."

"Oh, time!" Mr. Bender impatiently sighed. "But we'll give you all we've got—only I guess it isn't much." And he appeared freely to invite their companions to join in this estimate. They listened to him, however, they watched him, for the moment, but in silence, and with the next he had gone on: "How much higher—if your idea is correct about it—would Lord Theign's picture come?"

Hugh turned to that nobleman. "Does Mr. Bender mean come to him, my lord?"

Lord Theign looked again hard at Hugh, and then harder than he had done yet at his other invader. "I don't know what Mr. Bender means!" With which he turned off.

"Well, I guess I mean that it would come higher to me than to any one! But how much higher?" the American continued to Hugh.

"How much higher to you?"

"Oh, I can size that. How much higher as a Mantovano?"

Unmistakably—for us at least—our young man was gaining time; he had the instinct of circumspection and delay. "To any one?"

"To any one."

"Than as a Moretto?" Hugh continued.

It even acted on Lord John's nerves. "That's what we're talking about—really!"

But Hugh still took his ease; as if, with his eyes first on Bender and then on Lord Theign, whose back was practically presented, he were covertly studying signs. "Well," he presently said, "in view of the very great interest combined with the very great rarity, more than—ah more than can be estimated off-hand."

It made Lord Theign turn round. "But a fine Moretto has a very great rarity and a very great interest."

"Yes—but not on the whole the same amount of either."

"No, not on the whole the same amount of either!"—Mr. Bender judiciously echoed it. "But how," he freely pursued, "are you going to find out?"

"Have I your permission, Lord Theign," Hugh brightly asked, "to attempt to find out?"

The question produced on his lordship's part a visible, a natural anxiety. "What would it be your idea then to do with my property?"

"Nothing at all here—it could all be done, I think, at Verona. What besets, what quite haunts me," Hugh explained, "is the vivid image of a Mantovano—one of the glories of the short list—in a private collection in that place. The conviction grows in me that the two portraits must be of the same original. In fact I'll bet my head," the young man quite ardently wound up, "that the wonderful subject of the Verona picture, a very great person clearly, is none other than the very great person of yours."

Lord Theign had listened with interest. "Mayn't he be that and yet from another hand?"

"It isn't another hand"—oh Hugh was quite positive. "It's the hand of the very same painter."

"How can you prove it's the same?"

"Only by the most intimate internal evidence, I admit—and evidence that of course has to be estimated."

"Then who," Lord Theign asked, "is to estimate it?"

"Well,"—Hugh was all ready—"will you let Pap-pendick, one of the first authorities in Europe, a good friend of mine, in fact more or less my master, and who is generally to be found at Brussels? I happen to know he knows your picture—he once spoke to me of it; and he'll go and look again at the Verona one, he'll go and judge our issue, if I apply to him, in the light of certain new tips that I shall be able to give him."

Lord Theign appeared to wonder. "If you 'apply' to him?"

"Like a shot, I believe, if I ask it of him—as a service."

"A service to you? He'll be very obliging," his lordship smiled.

"Well, I've obliged him!" Hugh readily retorted.

"The obligation will be to we"—Lord Theign spoke more formally.

"Well, the satisfaction," said Hugh, "will be to all of us. The things Pappendick has seen he intensely, ineffaceably keeps in mind, to every detail; so that he'll tell me—as no one else really can—if the Verona man is your man."

"But then," asked Mr. Bender, "we've got to believe anyway what he says?"

"The market," said Lord John with emphasis, "would have to believe it—that's the point."

"Oh," Hugh returned lightly, "the market will have nothing to do with it, I hope; but I think you'll feel when he has spoken that you really know where you are."

Mr. Bender couldn't doubt of that. "Oh, if he gives us a bigger thing we won't complain. Only, how long will it take him to get there? I want him to start right away."

"Well, as I'm sure he'll be deeply interested——"

"We may"—Mr. Bender took it straight up—"get news next week?"

Hugh addressed his reply to Lord Theign; it was already a little too much as if he and the American between them were snatching the case from that possessor's hands. "The day I hear from Pappendick you shall have a full report. And," he conscientiously added, "if I'm proved to have been unfortunately wrong——!"

His lordship easily pointed the moral. "You'll have caused me some inconvenience."

"Of course I shall," the young man unreservedly agreed—"like a wanton meddling ass!" His candour, his freedom had decidedly a note of their own. "But my conviction, after those moments with your picture, was too strong for me not to speak—and, since you allow it, I face the danger and risk the test."

"I allow it of course in the form of business." This produced in Hugh a certain blankness. "'Business'?" "If I consent to the inquiry I pay for the inquiry." Hugh demurred. "Even if I turn out mistaken?" "You make me in any event your proper charge." The young man thought again, and then as for vague accommodation: "Oh, my charge won't be high!"

"Ah," Mr. Bender protested, "it ought to be handsome if the thing's marked up!" After which he looked at his watch. "But I guess I've got to go, Lord Theign, though your lovely old Duchess—for it's to her I've lost my heart—does cry out for me again."

"You'll find her then still there," Lord John observed with emphasis, but with his eyes for the time on Lord Theign; "and if you want another look at her I'll presently come and take one too."

"I'll order your car to the garden-front," Lord Theign added to this; "you'll reach it from the saloon, but I'll see you again first."

Mr. Bender glared as with the round full force of his pair of motor lamps. "Well, if you're ready to talk about anything, I am. Good-bye, Mr. Crimble."

"Good-bye, Mr. Bender." But Hugh, addressing their host while his fellow-guest returned to the saloon, broke into the familiarity of confidence. "As if you could be ready to 'talk'!"

This produced on the part of the others present a mute exchange that could only have denoted surprise at all the irrepressible young outsider thus projected upon them took for granted. "I've an idea," said Lord John to his friend, "that you're quite ready to talk with me."

Hugh then, with his appetite so richly quickened, could but rejoice. "Lady Grace spoke to me of things in the library."

"You'll find it that way"—Lord Theign gave the indication.

"Thanks," said Hugh elatedly, and hastened away.

Lord John, when he had gone, found relief in a quick comment. "Very sharp, no doubt—but he wants taking down."

The master of Dedborough wouldn't have put it so crudely, but the young expert did bring certain things home. "The people my daughters, in the exercise of a wild freedom, do pick up——!"

"Well, don't you see that all you've got to do—on the question we're dealing with—is to claim your very own wild freedom? Surely I'm right in feeling you," Lord John further remarked, "to have jumped at once to my idea that Bender is heaven-sent—and at what they call the psychologic moment, don't they?—to point that moral. Why look anywhere else for a sum of money that—smaller or greater—you can find with perfect ease in that extraordinarily bulging pocket?"

Lord Theign, slowly pacing the hall again, threw up his hands. "Ah, with 'perfect ease' can scarcely be said!"

"Why not?—when he absolutely thrusts his dirty dollars down your throat."

"Oh, I'm not talking of ease to him," Lord Theign returned—"I'm talking of ease to myself. I shall have to make a sacrifice."

"Why not then—for so great a convenience—gallantly make it?"

"Ah, my dear chap, if you want me to sell my Sir Joshua——!"

But the horror in the words said enough, and Lord John felt its chill. "I don't make a point of that—God forbid! But there are other things to which the objection wouldn't apply."

"You see how it applies—in the case of the Moret-to—for him. A mere Moretto," said Lord Theign, "is too cheap—for a Yankee 'on the spend.'"

"Then the Mantovano wouldn't be."

"It remains to be proved that it is a Mantovano."

"Well," said Lord John, "go into it."

"Hanged if I won't!" his friend broke out after a moment. "It would suit me. I mean"—the explanation came after a brief intensity of thought—"the possible size of his cheque would."

"Oh," said Lord John gaily, "I guess there's no limit to the possible size of his cheque!"

"Yes, it would suit me, it would suit me!" the elder man, standing there, audibly mused. But his air changed and a lighter question came up to him as he saw his daughter reappear at the door from the terrace. "Well, the infant horde?" he immediately put to her.

Lady Grace came in, dutifully accounting for them. "They've marched off—in a huge procession."

"Thank goodness! And our friends?"

"All playing tennis," she said—"save those who are sitting it out." To which she added, as to explain her return: "Mr. Crimble has gone?"

Lord John took upon him to say. "He's in the library, to which you addressed him—making discoveries."

"Not then, I hope," she smiled, "to our disadvantage!"

"To your very great honour and glory." Lord John clearly valued the effect he might produce.

"Your Moretto of Brescia—do you know what it really and spendidly is?" And then as the girl, in her surprise, but wondered: "A Mantovano, neither more nor less. Ever so much more swagger."

"A Mantovano?" Lady Grace echoed. "Why, how tremendously jolly!"

Her father was struck. "Do you know the artist—of whom I had never heard?"

"Yes, something of the little that is known." And she rejoiced as her knowledge came to her. "He's a tremendous swell, because, great as he was, there are but seven proved examples——"

"With this of yours," Lord John broke in, "there are eight."

"Then why haven't I known about him?" Lord Theign put it as if so many other people were guilty for this.

His daughter was the first to plead for the vague body. "Why, I suppose in order that you should have exactly this pleasure, father."

"Oh, pleasures not desired are like acquaintances not sought—they rather bore one!" Lord Theign sighed. With which he moved away from her.

Her eyes followed him an instant—then she smiled at their guest. "Is he bored at having the higher prize—if you're sure it is the higher?"

"Mr. Crimble is sure—because if he isn't," Lord John added, "he's a wretch."

"Well," she returned, "as he's certainly not a wretch it must be true. And fancy," she exclaimed further, though as more particularly for herself, "our having suddenly incurred this immense debt to him!"

"Oh, I shall pay Mr. Crimble!" said her father, who had turned round.

The whole question appeared to have provoked in Lord John a rise of spirits and a flush of humour. "Don't you let him stick it on."

His host, however, bethinking himself, checked him. "Go you to Mr. Bender straight!"

Lord John saw the point. "Yes—till he leaves. But I shall find you here, shan't I?" he asked with all earnestness of Lady Grace.

She had an hesitation, but after a look at her father she assented. "I'll wait for you."

"Then a tantot!" It made him show for happy as, waving his hand at her, he proceeded to seek Mr. Bender in presence of the object that most excited that gentleman's appetite—to say nothing of the effect involved on Lord John's own.



IX

Lord Theign, when he had gone, revolved—it might have been nervously—about the place a little, but soon broke ground. "He'll have told you, I understand, that I've promised to speak to you for him. But I understand also that he has found something to say for himself."

"Yes, we talked—a while since," the girl said. "At least he did."

"Then if you listened I hope you listened with a good grace."

"Oh, he speaks very well—and I've never disliked him."

It pulled her father up. "Is that all—when I think so much of him?"

She seemed to say that she had, to her own mind, been liberal and gone far; but she waited a little. "Do you think very, very much?"

"Surely I've made my good opinion clear to you!"

Again she had a pause. "Oh yes, I've seen you like him and believe in him—and I've found him pleasant and clever."

"He has never had," Lord Theign more or less ingeniously explained, "what I call a real show." But the character under discussion could after all be summed up without searching analysis. "I consider nevertheless that there's plenty in him."

It was a moderate claim, to which Lady Grace might assent. "He strikes me as naturally quick and—well, nice. But I agree with you than he hasn't had a chance."

"Then if you can see your way by sympathy and confidence to help him to one I dare say you'll find your reward."

For a third time she considered, as if a certain curtness in her companion's manner rather hindered, in such a question, than helped. Didn't he simplify too much, you would have felt her ask, and wasn't his visible wish for brevity of debate a sign of his uncomfortable and indeed rather irritated sense of his not making a figure in it? "Do you desire it very particularly?" was, however, all she at last brought out.

"I should like it exceedingly—if you act from conviction. Then of course only; but of one thing I'm myself convinced—of what he thinks of yourself and feels for you."

"Then would you mind my waiting a little?" she asked. "I mean to be absolutely sure of myself." After which, on his delaying to agree, she added frankly, as to help her case: "Upon my word, father, I should like to do what would please you."

But it determined in him a sharper impatience. "Ah, what would please me! Don't put it off on 'me'! Judge absolutely for yourself"—he slightly took himself up—"in the light of my having consented to do for him what I always hate to do: deviate from my normal practice of never intermeddling. If I've deviated now you can judge. But to do so all round, of course, take—in reason!—your time."

"May I ask then," she said, "for still a little more?"

He looked for this, verily, as if it was not in reason. "You know," he then returned, "what he'll feel that a sign of."

"Well, I'll tell him what I mean."

"Then I'll send him to you."

He glanced at his watch and was going, but after a "Thanks, father," she had stopped him. "There's one thing more." An embarrassment showed in her manner, but at the cost of some effect of earnest abruptness she surmounted it. "What does your American—Mr. Bender—want?"

Lord Theign plainly felt the challenge. "'My' American? He's none of mine!"

"Well then Lord John's."

"He's none of his either—more, I mean, than any one else's. He's every one's American, literally—to all appearance; and I've not to tell you, surely, with the freedom of your own visitors, how people stalk in and out here."

"No, father—certainly," she said. "You're splendidly generous."

His eyes seemed rather sharply to ask her then how he could improve on that; but he added as if it were enough: "What the man must by this time want more than anything else is his car."

"Not then anything of ours?" she still insisted.

"Of 'ours'?" he echoed with a frown. "Are you afraid he has an eye to something of yours?"

"Why, if we've a new treasure—which we certainly have if we possess a Mantovano—haven't we all, even I, an immense interest in it?" And before he could answer, "Is that exposed?" she asked.

Lord Theign, a little unready, cast about at his storied halls; any illusion to the "exposure" of the objects they so solidly sheltered was obviously unpleasant to him. But then it was as if he found at a stroke both his own reassurance and his daughter's. "How can there be a question of it when he only wants Sir Joshuas?"

"He wants ours?" the girl gasped.

"At absolutely any price."

"But you're not," she cried, "discussing it?"

He hesitated as between chiding and contenting her—then he handsomely chose. "My dear child, for what do you take me?" With which he impatiently started, through the long and stately perspective, for the saloon.

She sank into a chair when he had gone; she sat there some moments in a visible tension of thought, her hands clasped in her lap and her dropped eyes fixed and unperceiving; but she sprang up as Hugh Crimble, in search of her, again stood before her. He presented himself as with winged sandals.

"What luck to find you! I must take my spin back."

"You've seen everything as you wished?"

"Oh," he smiled, "I've seen wonders."

She showed her pleasure. "Yes, we've got some things."

"So Mr. Bender says!" he laughed. "You've got five or six—"

"Only five or six?" she cried in bright alarm.

"'Only'?" he continued to laugh. "Why, that's enormous, five or six things of the first importance! But I think I ought to mention to you," he added, "a most barefaced 'Rubens' there in the library."

"It isn't a Rubens?"

"No more than I'm a Ruskin."

"Then you'll brand us—expose us for it?"

"No, I'll let you off—I'll be quiet if you're good, if you go straight. I'll only hold it in terrorem. One can't be sure in these dreadful days—that's always to remember; so that if you're not good I'll come down on you with it. But to balance against that threat," he went on, "I've made the very grandest find. At least I believe I have!"

She was all there for this news. "Of the Manto-vano—hidden in the other thing?"

Hugh wondered—almost as if she had been before him. "You don't mean to say you've had the idea of that?"

"No, but my father has told me."

"And is your father," he eagerly asked, "really gratified?"

With her conscious eyes on him—her eyes could clearly be very conscious about her father—she considered a moment. "He always prefers old associations and appearances to new; but I'm sure he'll resign himself if you see your way to a certainty."

"Well, it will be a question of the weight of expert opinion that I shall invoke. But I'm not afraid," he resolutely said, "and I shall make the thing, from its splendid rarity, the crown and flower of your glory."

Her serious face shone at him with a charmed gratitude. "It's awfully beautiful then your having come to us so. It's awfully beautiful your having brought us this way, in a flash—as dropping out of a chariot of fire—more light and what you apparently feel with myself as more honour."

"Ah, the beauty's in your having yourself done it!" he returned. He gave way to the positive joy of it. "If I've brought the 'light' and the rest—that's to say the very useful information—who in the world was it brought me?"

She had a gesture of protest "You'd have come in some other way."

"I'm not so sure! I'm beastly shy—little as I may seem to show it: save in great causes, when I'm horridly bold and hideously offensive. Now at any rate I only know what has been." She turned off for it, moving away from him as with a sense of mingled things that made for unrest; and he had the next moment grown graver under the impression. "But does anything in it all," he asked, "trouble you?"

She faced about across the wider space, and there was a different note in what she brought out. "I don't know what forces me so to tell you things."

"'Tell' me?" he stared. "Why, you've told me nothing more monstrous than that I've been welcome!"

"Well, however that may be, what did you mean just now by the chance of our not 'going straight'? When you said you'd expose our bad—or is it our false?—Rubens in the event of a certain danger."

"Oh, in the event of your ever being bribed"—he laughed again as with relief. And then as her face seemed to challenge the word: "Why, to let anything—of your best!—ever leave Dedborough. By which I mean really of course leave the country." She turned again on this, and something in her air made him wonder. "I hope you don't feel there is such a danger? I understood from you half an hour ago that it was unthinkable."

"Well, it was, to me, half an hour ago," she said as she came nearer. "But if it has since come up?"

"'If' it has! But has it? In the form of that monster? What Mr. Bender wants is the great Duchess," he recalled.

"And my father won't sell her? No, he won't sell the great Duchess—there I feel safe. But he greatly needs a certain sum of money—or he thinks he does—and I've just had a talk with him."

"In which he has told you that?"

"He has told me nothing," Lady Grace said—"or else told me quite other things. But the more I think of them the more it comes to me that he feels urged or tempted—"

"To despoil and denude these walls?" Hugh broke in, looking about in his sharper apprehension.

"Yes, to satisfy, to save my sister. Now do you think our state so ideal?" she asked—but without elation for her hint of triumph.

He had no answer for this save "Ah, but you terribly interest me. May I ask what's the matter with your sister?"

Oh, she wanted to go on straight now! "The matter is—in the first place—that she's too dazzlingly, dreadfully beautiful."

"More beautiful than you?" his sincerity easily risked.

"Millions of times." Sad, almost sombre, she hadn't a shade of coquetry. "Kitty has debts—great heaped-up gaming debts."

"But to such amounts?"

"Incredible amounts it appears. And mountains of others too. She throws herself all on our father."

"And he has to pay them? There's no one else?" Hugh asked.

She waited as if he might answer himself, and then as he apparently didn't, "He's only afraid there may be some else—that's how she makes him do it," she said. And "Now do you think," she pursued, "that I don't tell you things?"

He turned them over in his young perception and pity, the things she told him. "Oh, oh, oh!" And then, in the great place, while as, just spent by the effort of her disclosure, she moved from him again, he took them all in. "That's the situation that, as you say, may force his hand."

"It absolutely, I feel, does force it." And the renewal of her appeal brought her round. "Isn't it too lovely?"

His frank disgust answered. "It's too damnable!"

"And it's you," she quite terribly smiled, "who—by the 'irony of fate'!—have given him help."

He smote his head in the light of it. "By the Mantovano?"

"By the possible Mantovano—as a substitute for the impossible Sir Joshua. You've made him aware of a value."

"Ah, but the value's to be fixed!"

"Then Mr. Bender will fix it!"

"Oh, but—as he himself would say—I'll fix Mr. Bender!" Hugh declared. "And he won't buy a pig in a poke."

This cleared the air while they looked at each other; yet she had already asked: "What in the world can you do, and how in the world can you do it?"

Well, he was too excited for decision. "I don't quite see now, but give me time." And he took out his watch as already to measure it. "Oughtn't I before I go to say a word to Lord Theign?"

"Is it your idea to become a lion in his path?"

"Well, say a cub—as that's what I'm afraid he'll call me! But I think I should speak to him."

She drew a conclusion momentarily dark. "He'll have to learn in that case that I've told you of my fear."

"And is there any good reason why he shouldn't?"

She kept her eyes on him and the darkness seemed to clear. "No!" she at last replied, and, having gone to touch an electric bell, was with him again. "But I think I'm rather sorry for you."

"Does that represent a reason why I should be so for you?"

For a little she said nothing; but after that: "None whatever!"

"Then is the sister of whom you speak Lady Imber?"

Lady Grace, at this, raised her hand in caution: the butler had arrived, with due gravity, in answer to her ring; to whom she made known her desire. "Please say to his lordship—in the saloon or wherever—that Mr. Crimble must go." When Banks had departed, however, accepting the responsibility of this mission, she answered her friend's question. "The sister of whom I speak is Lady Imber."

"She loses then so heavily at bridge?"

"She loses more than she wins."

Hugh gazed as with interest at these oddities of the great. "And yet she still plays?"

"What else, in her set, should she do?"

This he was quite unable to say; but he could after a moment's exhibition of the extent to which he was out of it put a question instead. "So you're not in her set?"

"I'm not in her set."

"Then decidedly," he said, "I don't want to save her. I only want—"

He was going on, but she broke in: "I know what you want!"

He kept his eyes on her till he had made sure—and this deep exchange between them had a beauty. "So you're now with me?"

"I'm now with you!"

"Then," said Hugh, "shake hands on it"

He offered her his hand, she took it, and their grasp became, as you would have seen in their fine young faces, a pledge in which they stood a minute locked. Lord Theign came upon them from the saloon in the midst of the process; on which they separated as with an air of its having consisted but of Hugh's leave-taking. With some such form of mere civility, at any rate, he appeared, by the manner in which he addressed himself to Hugh, to have supposed them occupied.

"I'm sorry my daughter can't keep you; but I must at least thank you for your interesting view of my picture."

Hugh indulged in a brief and mute, though very grave, acknowledgment of this expression; presently speaking, however, as on a resolve taken with a sense of possibly awkward consequences: "May I—before you're sure of your indebtedness—put you rather a straight question, Lord Theign?" It sounded doubtless, and of a sudden, a little portentous—as was in fact testified to by his lordship's quick stiff stare, full of wonder at so free a note. But Hugh had the courage of his undertaking. "If I contribute in ny modest degree to establishing the true authorship of the work you speak of, may I have from you an assurance that my success isn't to serve as a basis for any peril—or possibility—of its leaving the country?"

Lord Theign was visibly astonished, but had also, independently of this, turned a shade pale. "You ask of me an 'assurance'?"

Hugh had now, with his firmness and his strained smile, quite the look of having counted the cost of his step. "I'm afraid I must, you see."

It pressed at once in his host the spring of a very grand manner. "And pray by what right here do you do anything of the sort?"

"By the right of a person from whom you, on your side, are accepting a service."

Hugh had clearly determined in his opponent a rise of what is called spirit. "A service that you half an hour ago thrust on me, sir—and with which you may take it from me that I'm already quite prepared to dispense."

"I'm sorry to appear indiscreet," our young man returned; "I'm sorry to have upset you in any way. But I can't overcome my anxiety—"

Lord Theign took the words from his lips. "And you therefore invite me—at the end of half an hour in this house!—to account to you for my personal intentions and my private affairs and make over my freedom to your hands?"

Hugh stood there with his eyes on the black and white pavement that stretched about him—the great loz-enged marble floor that might have figured that ground of his own vision which he had made up his mind to "stand." "I can only see the matter as I see it, and I should be ashamed not to have seized any chance to appeal to you." Whatever difficulty he had had shyly to face didn't exist for him now. "I entreat you to think again, to think well, before you deprive us of such a source of just envy."

"And you regard your entreaty as helped," Lord Theign asked, "by the beautiful threat you are so good as to attach to it?" Then as his monitor, arrested, exchanged a searching look with Lady Grace, who, showing in her face all the pain of the business, stood off at the distance to which a woman instinctively retreats when a scene turns to violence as precipitately as this one appeared to strike her as having turned: "I ask you that not less than I should like to know whom you speak of as 'deprived' of property that happens—for reasons that I don't suppose you also quarrel with!—to be mine."

"Well, I know nothing about threats, Lord Theign," Hugh said, "but I speak of all of us—of all the people of England; who would deeply deplore such an act of alienation, and whom, for the interest they bear you, I beseech you mercifully to consider."

"The interest they bear me?"—the master of Dedborough fairly bristled with wonder. "Pray how the devil do they show it?"

"I think they show it in all sorts of ways"—and Hugh's critical smile, at almost any moment hovering, played over the question in a manner seeming to convey that he meant many things.

"Understand then, please," said Lord Theign with every inch of his authority, "that they'll show it best by minding their own business while I very particularly mind mine."

"You simply do, in other words," Hugh explicitly concluded, "what happens to be convenient to you."

"In very distinct preference to what happens to be convenient to you! So that I need no longer detain you," Lord Theign added with the last dryness and as if to wind up their brief and thankless connection.

The young man took his dismissal, being able to do no less, while, unsatisfied and unhappy, he looked about mechanically for the cycling-cap he had laid down somewhere in the hall on his arrival. "I apologise, my lord, if I seem to you to have ill repaid your hospitality. But," he went on with his uncommended cheer, "my interest in your picture remains."

Lady Grace, who had stopped and strayed and stopped again as a mere watchful witness, drew nearer hereupon, breaking her silence for the first time. "And please let me say, father, that mine also grows and grows."

It was obvious that this parent, surprised and disconcerted by her tone, judged her contribution superfluous. "I'm happy to hear it, Grace—but yours is another affair."

"I think on the contrary that it's quite the same one," she returned—"since it's on my hint to him that Mr. Crimble has said to you what he has." The resolution she had gathered while she awaited her chance sat in her charming eyes, which met, as she spoke, the straighter paternal glare. "I let him know that I supposed you to think of profiting by the importance of Mr. Bender's visit."

"Then you might have spared, my dear, your—I suppose and hope well-meant—interpretation of my mind." Lord Theign showed himself at this point master of the beautiful art of righting himself as without having been in the wrong. "Mr. Bender's visit will terminate—as soon as he has released Lord John—without my having profited in the smallest particular."

Hugh meanwhile evidently but wanted to speak for his friend. "It was Lady Grace's anxious inference, she will doubtless let me say for her, that my idea about the Moretto would add to your power—well," he pushed on not without awkwardness, "of 'realising' advantageously on such a prospective rise."

Lord Theign glanced at him as for positively the last time, but spoke to Lady Grace. "Understand then, please, that, as I detach myself from any association with this gentleman's ideas—whether about the Moretto or about anything else—his further application of them ceases from this moment to concern us."

The girl's rejoinder was to address herself directly to Hugh, across their companion. "Will you make your inquiry for me then?"

The light again kindled in him. "With all the pleasure in life!" He had found his cap and, taking them together, bowed to the two, for departure, with high emphasis of form. Then he marched off in the direction from which he had entered.

Lord Theign scarce waited for his disappearance to turn in wrath to Lady Grace. "I denounce the indecency, wretched child, of your public defiance of me!"

They were separated by a wide interval now, and though at her distance she met his reproof so unshrinkingly as perhaps to justify the terms into which it had broken, she became aware of a reason for his not following it up. She pronounced in quick warning "Lord John!"—for their friend, released from among the pictures, was rejoining them, was already there.

He spoke straight to his host on coming into sight. "Bender's at last off, but"—he indicated the direction of the garden front—"you may still find him, out yonder, prolonging the agony with Lady Sand-gate."

Lord Theign remained a moment, and the heat of his resentment remained. He looked with a divided discretion, the pain of his indecision, from his daughter's suitor and his approved candidate to that contumacious young woman and back again; then choosing his course in silence he had a gesture of almost desperate indifference and passed quickly out by the door to the terrace.

It had left Lord John gaping. "What on earth's the matter with your father?"

"What on earth indeed?" Lady Grace unaidingly asked. "Is he discussing with that awful man?"

"Old Bender? Do you think him so awful?" Lord John showed surprise—which might indeed have passed for harmless amusement; but he shook everything off in view of a nearer interest. He quite waved old Bender away. "My dear girl, what do we care—?"

"I care immensely, I assure you," she interrupted, "and I ask of you, please, to tell me!"

Her perversity, coming straight and which he had so little expected, threw him back so that he looked at her with sombre eyes. "Ah, it's not for such a matter I'm here, Lady Grace—I'm here with that fond question of my own." And then as she turned away, leaving him with a vehement motion of protest: "I've come for your kind answer—the answer your father instructed me to count on."

"I've no kind answer to give you!"—she raised forbidding hands. "I entreat you to leave me alone."

There was so high a spirit and so strong a force in it that he stared as if stricken by violence. "In God's name then what has happened—when you almost gave me your word?"

"What has happened is that I've found it impossible to listen to you." And she moved as if fleeing she scarce knew whither before him.

He had already hastened around another way, however, as to meet her in her quick circuit of the hall. "That's all you've got to say to me after what has passed between us?"

He had stopped her thus, but she had also stopped him, and her passionate denial set him a limit. "I've got to say—sorry as I am—that if you must have an answer it's this: that never, Lord John, never, can there be anything more between us." And her gesture cleared her path, permitting her to achieve her flight. "Never, no, never," she repeated as she went—"never, never, never!" She got off by the door at which she had been aiming to some retreat of her own, while aghast and defeated, left to make the best of it, he sank after a moment into a chair and remained quite pitiably staring before him, appealing to the great blank splendour.



BOOK SECOND



I

LADY SANDGATE, on a morning late in May, entered her drawing-room by the door that opened at the right of that charming retreat as a person coming in faced Bruton Street; and she met there at this moment Mr. Gotch, her butler, who had just appeared in the much wider doorway forming opposite the Bruton Street windows an apartment not less ample, lighted from the back of the house and having its independent connection with the upper floors and the lower. She showed surprise at not immediately finding the visitor to whom she had been called.

"But Mr. Crimble———?"

"Here he is, my lady." And he made way for that gentleman, who emerged from the back room; Gotch observing the propriety of a prompt withdrawal.

"I went in for a minute, with your servant's permission," Hugh explained, "to see your famous Lawrence—which is splendid; he was so good as to arrange the light." The young man's dress was of a form less relaxed than on the occasion of his visit to Dedborough; yet the soft felt hat that he rather restlessly crumpled as he talked marked the limit of his sacrifice to vain appearances.

Lady Sandgate was at once interested in the punctuality of his reported act. "Gotch thinks as much of my grandmother as I do—and even seems to have ended by taking her for his very own."

"One sees, unmistakably, from her beauty, that you at any rate are of her line," Hugh allowed himself, not without confidence, the amusement of replying; "and I must make sure of another look at her when I've a good deal more time."

His hostess heard him as with a lapse of hope. "You hadn't then come for the poor dear?" And then as he obviously hadn't, but for something quite else: "I thought, from so prompt an interest, that she might be coveted—!" It dropped with a yearning sigh.

"You imagined me sent by some prowling collector?" Hugh asked. "Ah, I shall never do their work—unless to betray them: that I shouldn't in the least mind!—and I'm here, frankly, at this early hour, to ask your consent to my seeing Lady Grace a moment on a particular business, if she can kindly give me time."

"You've known then of her being with me?"

"I've known of her coming to you straight on leaving Dedborough," he explained; "of her wishing not to go to her sister's, and of Lord Theign's having proceeded, as they say, or being on the point of proceeding, to some foreign part."

"And you've learnt it from having seen her—these three or four weeks?"

"I've met her—but just barely—two or three times: at a 'private view' at the opera, in the lobby, and that sort of thing. But she hasn't told you?"

Lady Sandgate neither affirmed nor denied; she only turned on him her thick lustre. "I wanted to see how much you'd tell." She waited even as for more, but this not coming she helped herself. "Once again at dinner?"

"Yes, but alas not near her!"

"Once then at a private view?—when, with the squash they usually are, you might have been very near her indeed!"

The young man, his hilarity quickened, took but a moment for the truth. "Yes—it was a squash!"

"And once," his hostess pursued, "in the lobby of the opera?"

"After 'Tristan'—yes; but with some awful grand people I didn't know."

She recognised; she estimated the grandeur. "Oh, the Pennimans are nobody! But now," she asked, "you've come, you say, on 'business'?"

"Very important, please—which accounts for the hour I've ventured and the appearance I present."

"I don't ask you too much to 'account,'" Lady Sandgate kindly said; "but I can't not wonder if she hasn't told you what things have happened."

He cast about. "She has had no chance to tell me anything—beyond the fact of her being here."

"Without the reason?"

"'The reason'?" he echoed.

She gave it up, going straighter. "She's with me then as an old firm friend. Under my care and protection."

"I see"—he took it, with more penetration than enthusiasm, as a hint in respect to himself. "She puts you on your guard."

Lady Sandgate expressed it more graciously. "She puts me on my honour—or at least her father does."

"As to her seeing me"

"As to my seeing at least—what may happen to her."

"Because—you say—things have happened?"

His companion fairly sounded him. "You've only talked—when you've met—of 'art'?"

"Well," he smiled, "'art is long'!"

"Then I hope it may see you through! But you should know first that Lord Theign is presently due—"

"Here, back already from abroad?"—he was all alert.

"He has not yet gone—he comes up this morning to start."

"And stops here on his way?"

"To take the train de luxe this afternoon to his annual Salsomaggiore. But with so little time to spare," she went on reassuringly, "that, to simplify—as he wired me an hour ago from Dedborough—he has given rendezvous here to Mr. Bender, who is particularly to wait for him."

"And who may therefore arrive at any moment?"

She looked at her bracelet watch. "Scarcely before noon. So you'll just have your chance—"

"Thank the powers then!"—Hugh grasped at it. "I shall have it best if you'll be so good as to tell me first—well," he faltered, "what it is that, to my great disquiet, you've further alluded to; what it is that has occurred."

Lady Sandgate took her time, but her good-nature and other sentiments pronounced. "Haven't you at least guessed that she has fallen under her father's extreme reprobation?"

"Yes, so much as that—that she must have greatly annoyed him—I have been supposing. But isn't it by her having asked me to act for her? I mean about the Mantovano—which I have done."

Lady Sandgate wondered. "You've 'acted'?"

"It's what I've come to tell her at last—and I'm all impatience."

"I see, I see"—she had caught a clue. "He hated that—yes; but you haven't really made out," she put to him, "the other effect of your hour at Dedborough?" She recognised, however, while she spoke, that his divination had failed, and she didn't trouble him to confess it. "Directly you had gone she 'turned down' Lord John. Declined, I mean, the offer of his hand in marriage."

Hugh was clearly as much mystified as anything else. "He proposed there—?"

"He had spoken, that day, before—before your talk with Lord Theign, who had every confidence in her accepting him. But you came, Mr. Crimble, you went; and when her suitor reappeared, just after you had gone, for his answer—"

"She wouldn't have him?" Hugh asked with a precipitation of interest.

But Lady Sandgate could humour almost any curiosity. "She wouldn't look at him."

He bethought himself. "But had she said she would?"

"So her father indignantly considers."

"That's the ground of his indignation?"

"He had his reasons for counting on her, and it has determined a painful crisis."

Hugh Crimble turned this over—feeling apparently for something he didn't find. "I'm sorry to hear such things, but where's the connection with me?"

"Ah, you know best yourself, and if you don't see any—-!" In that case, Lady Sandgate's motion implied, she washed her hands of it.

Hugh had for a moment the air of a young man treated to the sweet chance to guess a conundrum—which he gave up. "I really don't see any, Lady Sandgate. But," he a little inconsistently said, "I'm greatly obliged to you for telling me."

"Don't mention it!—though I think it is good of me," she smiled, "on so short an acquaintance." To which she added more gravely: "I leave you the situation—but I'm willing to let you know that I'm all on Grace's side."

"So am I, rather!—please let me frankly say."

He clearly refreshed, he even almost charmed her. "It's the very least you can say!—though I'm not sure whether you say it as the simplest or as the very subtlest of men. But in case you don't know as I do how little the particular candidate I've named——"

"Had a right or a claim to succeed with her?" he broke in—all quick intelligence here at least. "No, I don't perhaps know as well as you do—but I think I know as well as I just yet require."

"There you are then! And if you did prevent," his hostess maturely pursued, "what wouldn't have been—well, good or nice, I'm quite on your side too."

Our young man seemed to feel the shade of ambiguity, but he reached at a meaning. "You're with me in my plea for our defending at any cost of effort or ingenuity—"

"The precious picture Lord Theign exposes?"—she took his presumed sense faster than he had taken hers. But she hung fire a moment with her reply to it. "Well, will you keep the secret of everything I've said or say?"

"To the death, to the stake, Lady Sandgate!"

"Then," she momentously returned, "I only want, too, to make Bender impossible. If you ask me," she pursued, "how I arrange that with my deep loyalty to Lord Theign——"

"I don't ask you anything of the sort," he interrupted—"I wouldn't ask you for the world; and my own bright plan for achieving the coup you mention———"

"You'll have time, at the most," she said, consulting afresh her bracelet watch, "to explain to Lady Grace." She reached an electric bell, which she touched—facing then her visitor again with an abrupt and slightly embarrassed change of tone. "You do think my great portrait splendid?"

He had strayed far from it and all too languidly came back. "Your Lawrence there? As I said, magnificent."

But the butler had come in, interrupting, straight from the lobby; of whom she made her request. "Let her ladyship know—Mr. Crimble."

Gotch looked hard at Hugh and the crumpled hat—almost as if having an option. But he resigned himself to repeating, with a distinctness that scarce fell short of the invidious, "Mr. Crimble," and departed on his errand.

Lady Sandgate's fair flush of diplomacy had meanwhile not faded. "Couldn't you, with your immense cleverness and power, get the Government to do something?"

"About your picture?" Hugh betrayed on this head a graceless detachment. "You too then want to sell?"

Oh she righted herself. "Never to a private party!"

"Mr. Bender's not after it?" he asked—though scarce lighting his reluctant interest with a forced smile.

"Most intensely after it. But never," cried the proprietress, "to a bloated alien!"

"Then I applaud your patriotism. Only why not," he asked, "carrying that magnanimity a little further, set us all an example as splendid as the object itself?"

"Give it you for nothing?" She threw up shocked hands. "Because I'm an aged female pauper and can't make every sacrifice."

Hugh pretended—none too convincingly—to think. "Will you let them have it very cheap?"

"Yes—for less than such a bribe as Bender's."

"Ah," he said expressively, "that might be, and still——!"

"Well," she had a flare of fond confidence. "I'll find out what he'll offer—if you'll on your side do what you can—and then ask them a third less." And she followed it up—as if suddenly conceiving him a prig. "See here, Mr. Crimble, I've been—and this very first time I—charming to you."

"You have indeed," he returned; "but you throw back on it a lurid light if it has all been for that!"

"It has been—well, to keep things as I want them; and if I've given you precious information mightn't you on your side—"

"Estimate its value in cash?"—Hugh sharply took her up. "Ah, Lady Sandgate, I am in your debt, but if you really bargain for your precious information I'd rather we assume that I haven't enjoyed it."

She made him, however, in reply, a sign for silence; she had heard Lady Grace enter the other room from the back landing, and, reaching the nearer door, she disposed of the question with high gay bravery. "I won't bargain with the Treasury!"—she had passed out by the time Lady Grace arrived.



II

As Hugh recognised in this friend's entrance and face the light of welcome he went, full of his subject, straight to their main affair. "I haven't been able to wait, I've wanted so much to tell you—I mean how I've just come back from Brussels, where I saw Pappen-dick, who was free and ready, by the happiest chance, to start for Verona, which he must have reached some time yesterday."

The girl's responsive interest fairly broke into rapture. "Ah, the dear sweet thing!"

"Yes, he's a brick—but the question now hangs in the balance. Allowing him time to have got into relation with the picture, I've begun to expect his wire, which will probably come to my club; but my fidget, while I wait, has driven me"—he threw out and dropped his arms in expression of his soft surrender—"well, just to do this: to come to you here, in my fever, at an unnatural hour and uninvited, and at least let you know I've 'acted.'"

"Oh, but I simply rejoice," Lady Grace declared, "to be acting with you."

"Then if you are, if you are," the young man cried, "why everything's beautiful and right!"

"It's all I care for and think of now," she went on in her bright devotion, "and I've only wondered and hoped!"

Well, Hugh found for it all a rapid, abundant lucidity. "He was away from home at first, and I had to wait—but I crossed last week, found him and settled incoming home by Paris, where I had a grand four days' jaw with the fellows there and saw their great specimen of our master: all of which has given him time."

"And now his time's up?" the girl eagerly asked.

"It must be—and we shall see." But Hugh postponed that question to a matter of more moment still. "The thing is that at last I'm able to tell you how I feel the trouble I've brought you."

It made her, quickly colouring, rest grave eyes on him. "What do you know—when I haven't told you—about my 'trouble'?"

"Can't I have guessed, with a ray of intelligence?"—he had his answer ready. "You've sought asylum with this good friend from the effects of your father's resentment."

"'Sought asylum' is perhaps excessive," Lady Grace returned—"though it wasn't pleasant with him after that hour, no," she allowed. "And I couldn't go, you see, to Kitty."

"No indeed, you couldn't go to Kitty." He smiled at her hard as he added: "I should have liked to see you go to Kitty! Therefore exactly is it that I've set you adrift—that I've darkened and poisoned your days. You're paying with your comfort, with your peace, for having joined so gallantly in my grand remonstrance."

She shook her head, turning from him, but then turned back again—as if accepting, as if even relieved by, this version of the prime cause of her state. "Why do you talk of it as 'paying'—if it's all to come back to my being paid? I mean by your blest success—if you really do what you want."

"I have your word for it," he searchingly said, "that our really pulling it off together will make up to you——?"

"I should be ashamed if it didn't, for everything!"—she took the question from his mouth. "I believe in such a cause exactly as you do—and found a lesson, at Dedborough, in your frankness and your faith."

"Then you'll help me no end," he said all simply and sincerely.

"You've helped me already"—that she gave him straight back. And on it they stayed a moment, their strenuous faces more intensely communing.

"You're very wonderful—for a girl!" Hugh brought out.

"One has to be a girl, naturally, to be a daughter of one's house," she laughed; "and that's all I am of ours—but a true and a right and a straight one."

He glowed with his admiration. "You're splendid!"

That might be or not, her light shrug intimated; she gave it, at any rate, the go-by and more exactly stated her case. "I see our situation."

"So do I, Lady Grace!" he cried with the strongest emphasis. "And your father only doesn't."

"Yes," she said for intelligent correction—"he sees it, there's nothing in life he sees so much. But unfortunately he sees it all wrong."

Hugh seized her point of view as if there had been nothing of her that he wouldn't have seized. "He sees it all wrong then! My appeal the other day he took as a rude protest. And any protest——"

"Any protest," she quickly and fully agreed, "he takes as an offence, yes. It's his theory that he still has rights," she smiled, "though he is a miserable peer."

"How should he not have rights," said Hugh, "when he has really everything on earth?"

"Ah, he doesn't even know that—he takes it so much for granted." And she sought, though as rather sadly and despairingly, to explain. "He lives all in his own world."

"He lives all in his own, yes; but he does business all in ours—quite as much as the people who come up to the city in the Tube." With which Hugh had a still sharper recall of the stiff actual. "And he must be here to do business to-day."

"You know," Lady Grace asked, "that he's to meet Mr. Bender?"

"Lady Sandgate kindly warned me, and," her companion saw as he glanced at the clock on the chimney, "I've only ten minutes, at best. The 'Journal' won't have been good for him," he added—"you doubtless have seen the 'Journal'?"

"No"—she was vague. "We live by the 'Morning Post.'"

"That's why our friend here didn't speak then," Hugh said with a better light—"which, out of a dim consideration for her, I didn't do, either. But they've a leader this morning about Lady Lappington and her Longhi, and on Bender and his hauls, and on the certainty—if we don't do something energetic—of more and more Benders to come: such a conquering horde as invaded the old civilisation, only armed now with huge cheque-books instead of with spears and battle-axes. They refer to the rumour current—as too horrific to believe—of Lord Theign's putting up his Moretto; with the question of how properly to qualify any such sad purpose in him should the further report prove true of a new and momentous opinion about the picture entertained by several eminent authorities."

"Of whom," said the girl, intensely attached to this recital, "you're of course seen as not the least."

"Of whom, of course, Lady Grace, I'm as yet—however I'm 'seen'—the whole collection. But we've time"—he rested on that "The fat, if you'll allow me the expression, is on the fire—which, as I see the matter, is where this particular fat should be."

"Is the article, then," his companion appealed, "very severe?"

"I prefer to call it very enlightened and very intelligent—and the great thing is that it immensely 'marks,' as they say. It will have made a big public difference—from this day; though it's of course aimed not so much at persons as at conditions; which it calls upon us all somehow to tackle."

"Exactly"—she was full of the saving vision; "but as the conditions are directly embodied in persons——"

"Oh, of course it here and there bells the cat; which means that it bells three or four."

"Yes," she richly brooded—"Lady Lappington is a cat!"

"She will have been 'belled,' at any rate, with your father," Hugh amusedly went on, "to the certainty of a row; and a row can only be good for us—I mean for us in particular." Yet he had to bethink himself. "The case depends a good deal of course on how your father takes such a resounding rap."

"Oh, I know how he'll take it!"—her perception went all the way.

"In the very highest and properest spirit?"

"Well, you'll see." She was as brave as she was clear. "Or at least I shall!"

Struck with all this in her he renewed his homage. "You are, yes, splendid!"

"I even," she laughed, "surprise myself."

But he was already back at his calculations. "How early do the papers get to you?"

"At Dedborough? Oh, quite for breakfast—which isn't, however, very early."

"Then that's what has caused his wire to Bender."

"But how will such talk strike him?" the girl asked.

Hugh meanwhile, visibly, had not only followed his train of thought, he had let it lead him to certainty. "It will have moved Mr. Bender to absolute rapture."

"Rather," Lady Grace wondered, "than have put him off?"

"It will have put him prodigiously on! Mr. Bender—as he said to me at Dedborough of his noble host there," Hugh pursued—"is 'a very nice man'; but he's a product of the world of advertisment, and advertisement is all he sees and aims at. He lives in it as a saint in glory or a fish in water."

She took it from him as half doubting. "But mayn't advertisement, in so special a case, turn, on the whole, against him?"

Hugh shook a negative forefinger with an expression he might have caught from foreign comrades. "He rides the biggest whirlwind—he has got it saddled and bitted."

She faced the image, but cast about "Then where does our success come in?"

"In our making the beast, all the same, bolt with him and throw him." And Hugh further pointed the moral. "If in such proceedings all he knows is publicity the thing is to give him publicity, and it's only a question of giving him enough. By the time he has enough for himself, you see, he'll have too much for every one else—so that we shall 'up' in a body and slay him."

The girl's eyebrows, in her wondering face, rose to a question. "But if he has meanwhile got the picture?"

"We'll slay him before he gets it!" He revelled in the breadth of his view. "Our own policy must be to organise to that end the inevitable outcry. Organise Bender himself—organise him to scandal." Hugh had already even pity to spare for their victim. "He won't know it from a boom."

Though carried along, however, Lady Grace could still measure. "But that will be only if he wants and decides for the picture."

"We must make him then want and decide for it—decide, that is, for 'ours.' To save it we must work him up—he'll in that case want it so indecently much. Then we shall have to want it more!"

"Well," she anxiously felt it her duty to remind him, "you can take a horse to water——!"

"Oh, trust me to make him drink!"

There appeared a note in this that convinced her. "It's you, Mr. Crimble, who are 'splendid'!"

"Well, I shall be—with my jolly wire!" And all on that scent again, "May I come back to you from the club with Pappendick's news?" he asked.

"Why, rather, of course, come back!"

"Only not," he debated, "till your father has left."

Lady Grace considered too, but sharply decided. "Come when you have it. But tell me first," she added, "one thing." She hung fire a little while he waited, but she brought it out. "Was it you who got the 'Journal' to speak?"

"Ah, one scarcely 'gets' the 'Journal'!"

"Who then gave them their 'tip'?"

"About the Mantovano and its peril?" Well, he took a moment—but only not to say; in addition to which the butler had reappeared, entering from the lobby. "I'll tell you," he laughed, "when I come back!"

Gotch had his manner of announcement while the visitor was mounting the stairs. "Mr. Breckenridge Bender!"

"Ah then I go," said Lady Grace at once.

"I'll stay three minutes." Hugh turned with her, alertly, to the easier issue, signalling hope and cheer from that threshold as he watched her disappear; after which he faced about with as brave a smile and as ready for immediate action as if she had there within kissed her hand to him. Mr. Bender emerged at the same instant, Gotch withdrawing and closing the door behind him; and the former personage, recognising his young friend, threw up his hands for friendly pleasure.



III

"Ah, Mr. Crimble," he cordially inquired, "you've come with your great news?"

Hugh caught the allusion, it would have seemed, but after a moment. "News of the Moretto? No, Mr. Bender, I haven't news yet." But he added as with high candour for the visitor's motion of disappointment: "I think I warned you, you know, that it would take three or four weeks."

"Well, in my country," Mr. Bender returned with disgust, "it would take three or four minutes! Can't you make 'em step more lively?"

"I'm expecting, sir," said Hugh good-humouredly, "a report from hour to hour."

"Then will you let me have it right off?"

Hugh indulged in a pause; after which very frankly: "Ah, it's scarcely for you, Mr. Bender, that I'm acting!"

The great collector was but briefly checked. "Well, can't you just act for Art?"

"Oh, you're doing that yourself so powerfully," Hugh laughed, "that I think I had best leave it to you!"

His friend looked at him as some inspector on circuit might look at a new improvement. "Don't you want to go round acting with me?"

"Go 'on tour,' as it were? Oh, frankly, Mr. Bender," Hugh said, "if I had any weight——!"

"You'd add it to your end of the beam? Why, what have I done that you should go back on me—after working me up so down there? The worst I've done," Mr. Bender continued, "is to refuse that Moretto."

"Has it deplorably been offered you?" our young man cried, unmistakably and sincerely affected. After which he went on, as his fellow-visitor only eyed him hard, not, on second thoughts, giving the owner of the great work away: "Then why are you—as if you were a banished Romeo—so keen for news from Verona?" To this odd mixture of business and literature Mr. Bender made no reply, contenting himself with but a large vague blandness that wore in him somehow the mark of tested utility; so that Hugh put him another question: "Aren't you here, sir, on the chance of the Mantovano?"

"I'm here," he then imperturbably said, "because Lord Theign has wired me to meet him. Ain't you here for that yourself?"

Hugh betrayed for a moment his enjoyment of a "big" choice of answers. "Dear, no! I've but been in, by Lady Sandgate's leave, to see that grand Lawrence."

"Ah yes, she's very kind about it—one does go 'in.'" After which Mr. Bender had, even in the atmosphere of his danger, a throb of curiosity. "Is any one after that grand Lawrence?"

"Oh, I hope not," Hugh laughed, "unless you again dreadfully are: wonderful thing as it is and so just in its right place there."

"You call it," Mr. Bender impartially inquired, "a very wonderful thing?"

"Well, as a Lawrence, it has quite bowled me over"—Hugh spoke as for the strictly aesthetic awkwardness of that. "But you know I take my pictures hard." He gave a punch to his hat, pressed for time in this connection as he was glad truly to appear to his friend. "I must make my little rapport." Yet before it he did seek briefly to explain. "We're a band of young men who care—and we watch the great things. Also—for I must give you the real truth about myself—we watch the great people."

"Well, I guess I'm used to being watched—if that's the worst you can do." To which Mr. Bender added in his homely way: "But you know, Mr. Crimble, what I'm really after."

Hugh's strategy on this would again have peeped out for us. "The man in this morning's 'Journal' appears at least to have discovered."

"Yes, the man in this morning's 'Journal' has discovered three or four weeks—as it appears to take you here for everything—after my beginning to talk. Why, they knew I was talking that time ago on the other side."

"Oh, they know things in the States," Hugh cheerfully agreed, "so independently of their happening! But you must have talked loud."

"Well, I haven't so much talked as raved," Mr. Bender conceded—"for I'm afraid that when I do want a thing I rave till I get it. You heard me at Ded-borough, and your enterprising daily press has at last caught the echo."

"Then they'll make up for lost time! But have you done it," Hugh asked, "to prepare an alibi?"

"An alibi?"

"By 'raving,' as you say, the saddle on the wrong horse. I don't think you at all believe you'll get the Sir Joshua—but meanwhile we shall have cleared up the question of the Moretto."

Mr. Bender, imperturbable, didn't speak till he had done justice to this picture of his subtlety. "Then, why on earth do you want to boom the Moretto?"

"You ask that," said Hugh, "because it's the boomed thing that's most in peril."

"Well, it's the big, the bigger, the biggest things, and if you drag their value to the light why shouldn't we want to grab them and carry them off—the same as all of you originally did?"

"Ah, not quite the same," Hugh smiled—"that I will say for you!"

"Yes, you stick it on now—you have got an eye for the rise in values. But I grant you your unearned increment, and you ought to be mighty glad that, to such a time, I'll pay it you."

Our young man kept, during a moment's thought, his eyes on his companion, and then resumed with all intensity and candour: "You may easily, Mr. Bender, be too much for me—as you appear too much for far greater people. But may I ask you, very earnestly, for your word on this, as to any case in which that happens—that when precious things, things we are to lose here, are knocked down to you, you'll let us at least take leave of them, let us have a sight of them in London, before they're borne off?"

Mr. Bender's big face fell almost with a crash. "Hand them over, you mean, to the sandwich men on Bond Street?"

"To one or other of the placard and poster men—I don't insist on the inserted human slice! Let the great values, as a compensation to us, be on view for three or four weeks."

"You ask me," Mr. Bender returned, "for a general assurance to that effect?"

"Well, a particular one—so it be particular enough," Hugh said—"will do just for now. Let me put in my plea for the issue—well, of the value that's actually in the scales."

"The Mantovano-Moretto?"

"The Moretto-Mantovano!"

Mr. Bender carnivorously smiled. "Hadn't we better know which it is first?"

Hugh had a motion of practical indifference for this. "The public interest—playing so straight on the question—may help to settle it. By which I mean that it will profit enormously—the question of probability, of identity itself will—by the discussion it will create. The discussion will promote certainty——"

"And certainty," Mr. Bender massively mused, "will kick up a row."

"Of course it will kick up a row!"—Hugh thoroughly guaranteed that. "You'll be, for the month, the best-abused man in England—if you venture to remain here at all; except, naturally, poor Lord Theign."

"Whom it won't be my interest, at the same time, to worry into backing down."

"But whom it will be exceedingly mine to practise on"—and Hugh laughed as at the fun before them—"if I may entertain the sweet hope of success. The only thing is—from my point of view," he went on—"that backing down before what he will call vulgar clamour isn't in the least in his traditions, nothing less so; and that if there should be really too much of it for his taste or his nerves he'll set his handsome face as a stone and never budge an inch. But at least again what I appeal to you for will have taken place—the picture will have been seen by a lot of people who'll care."

"It will have been seen," Mr. Bender amended—"on the mere contingency of my acquisition of it—only if its present owner consents."

"'Consents'?" Hugh almost derisively echoed; "why, he'll propose it himself, he'll insist on it, he'll put it through, once he's angry enough—as angry, I mean, as almost any public criticism of a personal act of his will be sure to make him; and I'm afraid the striking criticism, or at least animadversion, of this morning, will have blown on his flame of bravado."

Inevitably a student of character, Mr. Bender rose to the occasion. "Yes, I guess he's pretty mad."

"They've imputed to him"—Hugh but wanted to abound in that sense—"an intention of which after all he isn't guilty."

"So that"—his listener glowed with interested optimism—"if they don't look out, if they impute it to him again, I guess he'll just go and be guilty!"

Hugh might at this moment have shown to an initiated eye as fairly elated by the sense of producing something of the effect he had hoped. "You entertain the fond vision of lashing them up to that mistake, oh fisher in troubled waters?" And then with a finer art, as his companion, expansively bright but crudely acute, eyed him in turn as if to sound him: "The strongest thing in such a type—one does make out—is his resentment of a liberty taken; and the most natural furthermore is quite that he should feel almost anything you do take uninvited from the groaning board of his banquet of life to be such a liberty."

Mr. Bender participated thus at his perceptive ease in the exposed aristocratic illusion. "Yes, I guess he has always lived as he likes, the way those of you who have got things fixed for them do, over here; and to have to quit it on account of unpleasant remark—"

But he gave up thoughtfully trying to express what this must be; reduced to the mere synthetic interjection "My!"

"That's it, Mr. Bender," Hugh said for the consecration of such a moral; "he won't quit it without a hard struggle."

Mr. Bender hereupon at last gave himself quite gaily away as to his high calculation of impunity. "Well, I guess he won't struggle too hard for me to hold on to him if I want to!"

"In the thick of the conflict then, however that may be," Hugh returned, "don't forget what I've urged on you—the claim of our desolate country."

But his friend had an answer to this. "My natural interest, Mr. Crimble—considering what I do for it—is in the claim of ours. But I wish you were on my side!"

"Not so much," Hugh hungrily and truthfully laughed, "as I wish you were on mine!" Decidedly, none the less, he had to go. "Good-bye—for another look here!"

He reached the doorway of the second room, where, however, his companion, freshly alert at this, stayed him by a gesture. "How much is she really worth?"

"'She'?" Hugh, staring a moment, was miles at sea. "Lady Sandgate?"

"Her great-grandmother."

A responsible answer was prevented—the butler was again with them; he had opened wide the other door and he named to Mr. Bender the personage under his convoy. "Lord John!"

Hugh caught this from the inner threshold, and it gave him his escape. "Oh, ask that friend!" With which he sought the further passage to the staircase and street, while Lord John arrived in charge of Mr. Gotch, who, having remarked to the two occupants of the front drawing-room that her ladyship would come, left them together.



IV

"Then Theign's not yet here!" Lord John had to resign himself as he greeted his American ally. "But he told me I should find you."

"He has kept me waiting," that gentleman returned—"but what's the matter with him anyway?"

"The matter with him"—Lord John treated such ignorance as irritating—"must of course be this beastly thing in the 'Journal.'"

Mr. Bender proclaimed, on the other hand, his incapacity to seize such connections. "What's the matter with the beastly thing?"

"Why, aren't you aware that the stiffest bit of it is a regular dig at you?"

"If you call that a regular dig you can't have had much experience of the Papers. I've known them to dig much deeper."

"I've had no experience of such horrid attacks, thank goodness; but do you mean to say," asked Lord John with the surprise of his own delicacy, "that you don't unpleasantly feel it?"

"Feel it where, my dear sir?"

"Why, God bless me, such impertinence, everywhere!"

"All over me at once?"—Mr. Bender took refuge in easy humour. "Well, I'm a large man—so when I want to feel so much I look out for something good. But what, if he suffers from the blot on his ermine—ain't that what you wear?—does our friend propose to do about it?"

Lord John had a demur, which was immediately followed by the apprehension of support in his uncertainty. Lady Sandgate was before them, having reached them through the other room, and to her he at once referred the question. "What will Theign propose, do you think, Lady Sandgate, to do about it?"

She breathed both her hospitality and her vagueness. "To 'do'——?"

"Don't you know about the thing in the 'Journal'—awfully offensive all round?"

"There'd be even a little pinch for you in it," Mr. Bender said to her—"if you were bent on fitting the shoe!"

Well, she met it all as gaily as was compatible with a firm look at her elder guest while she took her place with them. "Oh, the shoes of such monsters as that are much too big for poor me!" But she was more specific for Lord John. "I know only what Grace has just told me; but since it's a question of footgear dear Theign will certainly—what you may call—take his stand!"

Lord John welcomed this assurance. "If I know him he'll take it splendidly!"

Mr. Bender's attention was genial, though rather more detached. "And what—while he's about it—will he take it particularly on?"

"Oh, we've plenty of things, thank heaven," said Lady Sandgate, "for a man in Theign's position to hold fast by!"

Lord John freely confirmed it. "Scores and scores—rather! And I will say for us that, with the rotten way things seem going, the fact may soon become a real convenience."

Mr. Bender seemed struck—and not unsympathetic. "I see that your system would be rather a fraud if you hadn't pretty well fixed that!"

Lady Sandgate spoke as one at present none the less substantially warned and convinced. "It doesn't, however, alter the fact that we've thus in our ears the first growl of an outcry."

"Ah," Lord John concurred, "we've unmistakably the first growl of an outcry!"

Mr. Bender's judgment on the matter paused at sight of Lord Theign, introduced and announced, as Lord John spoke, by Gotch; but with the result of his addressing directly the person so presenting himself. "Why, they tell me that what this means, Lord Theign, is the first growl of an outcry!"

The appearance of the most eminent figure in the group might have been held in itself to testify to some such truth; in the sense at least that a certain conscious radiance, a gathered light of battle in his lordship's aspect would have been explained by his having taken the full measure—an inner success with which he glowed—of some high provocation. He was flushed, but he bore it as the ensign of his house; he was so admirably, vividly dressed, for the morning hour and for his journey, that he shone as with the armour of a knight; and the whole effect of him, from head to foot, with every jerk of his unconcern and every flash of his ease, was to call attention to his being utterly unshaken and knowing perfectly what he was about. It was at this happy pitch that he replied to the prime upsetter of his peace.

"I'm afraid I don't know what anything means to you, Mr. Bender—but it's exactly to find out that I've asked you, with our friend John, kindly to meet me here. For a very brief conference, dear lady, by your good leave," he went on to Lady Sandgate; "at which I'm only too pleased that you yourself should assist. The 'first growl' of any outcry, I may mention to you all, affects me no more than the last will——!"

"So I'm delighted to gather"—Lady Sandgate took him straight up—"that you don't let go your inestimable Cure."

He at first quite stared superior—"'Let go'?"—but then treated it with a lighter touch. "Upon my honour I might, you know—that dose of the daily press has made me feel so fit! I arrive at any rate," he pursued to the others and in particular to Mr. Bender, "I arrive with my decision taken—which I've thought may perhaps interest you. If that tuppeny rot is an attempt at an outcry I simply nip it in the bud."

Lord John rejoicingly approved. "Absolutely the only way—with the least self-respect—to treat it!"

Lady Sandgate, on the other hand, sounded a sceptical note. "But are you sure it's so easy, Theign, to hush up a real noise?"

"It ain't what I'd call a real one, Lady Sandgate," Mr. Bender said; "you can generally distinguish a real one from the squeak of two or three mice! But granted mice do affect you, Lord Theign, it will interest me to hear what sort of a trap—by what you say—you propose to set for them."

"You must allow me to measure, myself, Mr. Bender," his lordship replied, "the importance of a gross freedom publicly used with my absolutely personal proceedings and affairs; to the cause and origin of any definite report of which—in such circles!—I'm afraid I rather wonder if you yourself can't give me a clue."

It took Mr. Bender a minute to do justice to these stately remarks. "You rather wonder if I've talked of how I feel about your detaining in your hands my Beautiful Duchess——?"

"Oh, if you've already published her as 'yours'—with your power of publication!" Lord Theign coldly laughed,—"of course I trace the connection!"

Mr. Benders acceptance of responsibility clearly cost him no shade of a pang. "Why, I haven't for quite a while talked of a blessed other thing—and I'm capable of growing more profane over my not getting her than I guess any one would dare to be if I did."

"Well, you'll certainly not 'get' her, Mr. Bender," Lady Sandgate, as for reasons of her own, bravely trumpeted; "and even if there were a chance of it don't you see that your way wouldn't be publicly to abuse our noble friend?"

Mr. Bender but beamed, in reply, upon that personage. "Oh, I guess our noble friend knows I have to talk big about big things. You understand, sir, the scream of the eagle!"

"I'll forgive you," Lord Theign civilly returned, "all the big talk you like if you'll now understand me. My retort to that hireling pack shall be at once to dispose of a picture."

Mr. Bender rather failed to follow. "But that's what you wanted to do before."

"Pardon me," said his lordship—"I make a difference. It's what you wanted me to do."

The mystification, however, continued. "And you were not—as you seemed then—willing?"

Lord Theign waived cross-questions. "Well, I'm willing now—that's all that need concern us. Only, once more and for the last time," he added with all authority, "you can't have our Duchess!"

"You can't have our Duchess!"—and Lord John, as before the altar of patriotism, wrapped it in sacrificial sighs.

"You can't have our Duchess!" Lady Sandgate repeated, but with a grace that took the sting from her triumph. And she seemed still all sweet sociability as she added: "I wish he'd tell you too, you dreadful rich thing, that you can't have anything at all!"

Lord Theign, however, in the interest of harmony, deprecated that rigour. "Ah, what then would become of my happy retort?"

"And what—as it is," Mr. Bender asked—"becomes of my unhappy grievance?"

"Wouldn't a really great capture make up to you for that?"

"Well, I take more interest in what I want than in what I have—and it depends, don't you see, on how you measure the size."

Lord John had at once in this connection a bright idea. "Shouldn't you like to go back there and take the measure yourself?"

Mr. Bender considered him as through narrowed eyelids. "Look again at that tottering Moretto?"

"Well, its size—as you say—isn't in any light a negligible quantity."

"You mean that—big as it is—it hasn't yet stopped growing?"

The question, however, as he immediately showed, resided in what Lord Theign himself meant "It's more to the purpose," he said to Mr. Bender, "that I should mention to you the leading feature, or in other words the very essence, of my plan of campaign—which is to put the picture at once on view." He marked his idea with a broad but elegant gesture. "On view as a thing definitely disposed of."

"I say, I say, I say!" cried Lord John, moved by this bold stroke to high admiration.

Lady Sandgate's approval was more qualified. "But on view, dear Theign, how?"

"With one of those pushing people in Bond Street." And then as for the crushing climax of his policy: "As a Mantovano pure and simple."

"But my dear man," she quavered, "if it isn't one?"

Mr. Bender at once anticipated; the wind had suddenly risen for him and he let out sail. "Lady Sand-gate, it's going, by all that's—well, interesting, to be one!"

Lord Theign took him up with pleasure. "You seize me? We treat it as one!"

Lord John eagerly borrowed the emphasis. "We treat it as one!"

Mr. Bender meanwhile fed with an opened appetite on the thought—he even gave it back larger. "As the long-lost Number Eight!"

Lord Theign happily seized him. "That will be it—to a charm!"

"It will make them," Mr. Bender asked, "madder than anything?"

His patron—if not his client—put it more nobly. "It will markedly affirm my attitude."

"Which will in turn the more markedly create discussion."

"It may create all it will!"

"Well, if you don't mind it, I don't!" Mr. Bender concluded. But though bathed in this high serenity he was all for the rapid application of it elsewhere. "You'll put the thing on view right off?"

"As soon as the proper arrangement——"

"You put off your journey to make it?" Lady Sand-gate at once broke in.

Lord Theign bethought himself—with the effect of a gracious confidence in the others. "Not if these friends will act."

"Oh, I guess we'll act!" Mr. Bender declared.

"Ah, won't we though!" Lord John re-echoed.

"You understand then I have an interest?" Mr. Bender went on to Lord Theign.

His lordship's irony met it. "I accept that complication—which so much simplifies!"

"And yet also have a liberty?"

"Where else would be those you've taken? The point is," said Lord Theign, "that I have a show."

It settled Mr. Bender. "Then I'll fix your show." He snatched up his hat. "Lord John, come right round!"

Lord John had of himself reached the door, which he opened to let the whirlwind tremendously figured by his friend pass out first. Taking leave of the others he gave it even his applause. "The fellow can do anything anywhere!" And he hastily followed.



V

Lady Sandgate, left alone with Lord Theign, drew the line at their companion's enthusiasm. "That may be true of Mr. Bender—for it's dreadful how he bears one down. But I simply find him a terror."

"Well," said her friend, who seemed disposed not to fatigue the question, "I dare say a terror will help me." He had other business to which he at once gave himself. "And now, if you please, for that girl."

"I'll send her to you," she replied, "if you can't stay to luncheon."

"I've three or four things to do," he pleaded, "and I lunch with Kitty at one."

She submitted in that case—but disappointedly. "With Berkeley Square then you've time. But I confess I don't quite grasp the so odd inspiration that you've set those men to carry out."

He showed surprise and regret, but even greater decision. "Then it needn't trouble you, dear—it's enough that I myself go straight."

"Are you so very convinced it's straight?"—she wouldn't be a bore to him, but she couldn't not be a blessing.

"What in the world else is it," he asked, "when, having good reasons, one acts on 'em?"

"You must have an immense array," she sighed, "to fly so in the face of Opinion!"

"'Opinion'?" he commented—"I fly in its face? Why, the vulgar thing, as I'm taking my quiet walk, flies in mine! I give it a whack with my umbrella and send it about its business." To which he added with more reproach: "It's enough to have been dished by Grace—without your falling away!"

Sadly and sweetly she defended herself. "It's only my great affection—and all that these years have been for us: they it is that make me wish you weren't so proud."

"I've a perfect sense, my dear, of what these years have been for us—a very charming matter. But 'proud' is it you find me of the daughter who does her best to ruin me, or of the one who does her best to humiliate?"

Lady Sandgate, not undiscernibly, took her choice of ignoring the point of this. "Your surrenders to Kitty are your own affair—but are you sure you can really bear to see Grace?"

"I seem expected indeed to bear much," he said with more and more of his parental bitterness, "but I don't know that I'm yet in a funk before my child. Doesn't she want to see me, with any contrition, after the trick she has played me?" And then as his companion's answer failed: "In spite of which trick you suggest that I should leave the country with no sign of her explaining—?"

His hostess raised her head. "She does want to see you, I know; but you must recall the sequel to that bad hour at Dedborough—when it was you who declined to see her."

"Before she left the house with you, the next day, for this?"—he was entirely reminiscent. "What I recall is that even if I had condoned—that evening—her deception of me in my folly, I still loathed, for my friend's sake, her practical joke on poor John."

Lady Sandgate indulged in the shrug conciliatory. "It was your very complaint that your own appeal to her became an appeal from herself."

"Yes," he returned, so well he remembered, "she was about as civil to me then—picking a quarrel with me on such a trumped-up ground!—as that devil of a fellow in the newspaper; the taste of whose elegant remarks, for that matter, she must now altogether enjoy!"

His good friend showily balanced and might have been about to reply with weight; but what she in fact brought out was only: "I see you're right about it: I must let her speak for herself."

"That I shall greatly prefer to her speaking—as she did so extraordinarily, out of the blue, at Dedborough, upon my honour—for the wonderful friends she picks up: the picture-man introduced by her (what was his name?) who regularly 'cheeked' me, as I suppose he'd call it, in my own house, and whom I hope, by the way, that under this roof she's not able to be quite so thick with!"

If Lady Sandgate winced at that vain dream she managed not to betray it, and she had, in any embarrassment on this matter, the support, as we know, of her own tried policy. "She leads her life under this roof very much as under yours; and she's not of an age, remember, for me to pretend either to watch her movements or to control her contacts." Leaving him however thus to perform his pleasure the charming woman had before she went an abrupt change of tone. "Whatever your relations with others, dear friend, don't forget that I'm still here."

Lord Theign accepted the reminder, though, the circumstances being such, it scarce moved him to ecstasy. "That you're here, thank heaven, is of course a comfort—or would be if you understood."

"Ah," she submissively sighed, "if I don't always 'understand' a spirit so much higher than mine and a situation so much more complicated, certainly, I at least always defer, I at least always—well, what can I say but worship?" And then as he remained not other than finely passive, "The old altar, Theign," she went on—"and a spark of the old fire!"

He had not looked at her on this—it was as if he shrank, with his preoccupations, from a tender passage; but he let her take his left hand. "So I feel!" he was, however, kind enough to answer.

"Do feel!" she returned with much concentration. She raised the hand to her pressed lips, dropped it and with a rich "Good-bye!" reached the threshold of the other room.

"May I smoke?" he asked before she had disappeared.

"Dear, yes!"

He had meanwhile taken out his cigarette case and was looking about for a match. But something else occurred to him. "You must come to Victoria."

"Rather!" she said with intensity; and with that she passed away.



VI

Left alone he had a moment's meditation where he stood; it found issue in an articulate "Poor dear thing!"—an exclamation marked at once with patience and impatience, with resignation and ridicule. After which, waiting for his daughter, Lord Theign slowly and absently roamed, finding matches at last and lighting his cigarette—all with an air of concern that had settled on him more heavily from the moment of his finding himself alone. His luxury of gloom—if gloom it was—dropped, however, on his taking heed of Lady Grace, who, arriving on the scene through the other room, had had just time to stand and watch him in silence.

"Oh!" he jerked out at sight of her—which she had to content herself with as a parental greeting after separation, his next words doing little to qualify its dryness. "I take it for granted that you know I'm within a couple of hours of leaving England under a necessity of health." And then as drawing nearer, she signified without speaking her possession of this fact: "I've thought accordingly that before I go I should—on this first possible occasion since that odious occurrence at Dedborough—like to leave you a little more food for meditation, in my absence, on the painfully false position in which you there placed me." He carried himself restlessly even perhaps with a shade of awkwardness, to which her stillness was a contrast; she just waited, wholly passive—possibly indeed a trifle portentous. "If you had plotted and planned it in advance," he none the less firmly pursued, "if you had acted from some uncanny or malignant motive, you couldn't have arranged more perfectly to incommode, to disconcert and, to all intents and purposes, make light of me and insult me." Even before this charge she made no sign; with her eyes now attached to the ground she let him proceed. "I had practically guaranteed to our excellent, our charming friend, your favourable view of his appeal—which you yourself too, remember, had left him in so little doubt of!—so that, having by your performance so egregiously failed him, I have the pleasure of their coming down on me for explanations, for compensations, and for God knows what besides."

Lady Grace, looking up at last, left him in no doubt of the rigour of her attention. "I'm sorry indeed, father, to have done you any wrong; but may I ask whom, in such a connection, you refer to as 'they'?"

"'They'?" he echoed in the manner of a man who has had handed back to his more careful eye, across the counter, some questionable coin that he has tried to pass. "Why, your own sister to begin with—whose interest in what may make for your happiness I suppose you decently recognise; and his people, one and all, the delightful old Duchess in particular, who only wanted to be charming to you, and who are as good people, and as pleasant and as clever, damn it, when all's said and done, as any others that are likely to come your way." It clearly did his lordship good to work out thus his case, which grew more and more coherent to him and glowed with irresistible colour. "Letting alone gallant John himself, most amiable of men, about whose merits and whose claims you appear to have pretended to agree with me just that you might, when he presumed, poor chap, ardently to urge them, deal him with the more cruel effect that calculated blow on the mouth!"

It was clear that in the girl's great gravity embarrassment had no share. "They so come down on you I understand then, father, that you're obliged to come down on me?"

"Assuredly—for some better satisfaction than your just moping here without a sign!"

"But a sign of what, father?" she asked—as helpless as a lone islander scanning the horizon for a sail.

"Of your appreciating, of your in some degree dutifully considering, the predicament into which you've put me!"

"Hasn't it occurred to you in the least that you've rather put me into one?"

He threw back his head as from exasperated nerves. "I put you certainly in the predicament of your receiving by my care a handsome settlement in life—which all the elements that would make for your enjoying it had every appearance of successfully commending to you." The perfect readiness of which on his lips had, like a higher wave, the virtue of lifting and dropping him to still more tangible ground. "And if I understand you aright as wishing to know whether I apologise for that zeal, why you take a most preposterous view of our relation as father and daughter."

"You understand me no better than I fear I understand you," Lady Grace returned, "if what you expect of me is really to take back my words to Lord John." And then as he didn't answer, while their breach gaped like a jostled wound, "Have you seriously come to propose—and from him again," she added—"that I shall reconsider my resolute act and lend myself to your beautiful arrangement?"

It had so the sound of unmixed ridicule that he could only, for his dignity, not give way to passion. "I've come, above all, for this, I may say, Grace: to remind you of whom you're addressing when you jibe at me, and to make of you assuredly a plain demand—exactly as to whether you judged us to have actively incurred your treatment of our unhappy friend, to have brought it upon us, he and I, by my refusal to discuss with you at such a crisis the question of my disposition of a particular item of my property. I've only to look at you, for that matter," Lord Theign continued—always with a finer point and a higher consistency as his rehearsal of his wrongs broadened—"to have my inquiry, as it seems to me, eloquently answered. You flounced away from poor John, you took, as he tells me, 'his head off,' just to repay me for what you chose to regard as my snub on the score of your challenging my entertainment of a possible purchaser; a rebuke launched at me, practically, in the presence of a most inferior person, a stranger and an intruder, from whom you had all the air of taking your cue for naming me the great condition on which you'd gratify my hope. Am I to understand, in other words,"—and his lordship mounted to a climax—"that you sent us about our business because I failed to gratify your hope: that of my knocking under to your sudden monstrous pretension to lay down the law for my choice of ways and means of raising, to my best convenience, a considerable sum of money? You'll be so good as to understand, once for all, that I recognise there no right of interference from any quarter—and also to let that knowledge govern your behaviour in my absence."

Lady Grace had thus for some minutes waited on his words—waited even as almost with anxiety for the safe conduct he might look to from some of the more extravagant of them. But he at least felt at the end—if it was an end—all he owed them; so that there was nothing for her but to accept as achieved his dreadful felicity. "You're very angry with me, and I hope you won't feel me simply 'aggravating' if I say that, thinking everything over, I've done my best to allow for that. But I can answer your question if I do answer it by saying that my discovery of your possible sacrifice of one of our most beautiful things didn't predispose me to decide in favour of a person—however 'backed' by you—for whose benefit the sacrifice was to take place. Frankly," the girl pushed on, "I did quite hate, for the moment, everything that might make for such a mistake; and took the darkest view, let me also confess, of every one, without exception, connected with it I interceded with you, earnestly, for our precious picture, and you wouldn't on any terms have my intercession. On top of that Lord John blundered in, without timeliness or tact—and I'm afraid that, as I hadn't been the least in love with him even before, he did have to take the consequence."