Lord Theign, with an elated swing of his person, greeted this as all he could possibly want. "You recognise then that your reception of him was purely vindictive!—the meaning of which is that unless my conduct of my private interests, of which you know nothing whatever, happens to square with your superior wisdom you'll put me under boycott all round! While you chatter about mistakes and blunders, and about our charming friend's lack of the discretion of which you yourself set so grand an example, what account have you to offer of the scene you made me there before that fellow—your confederate, as he had all the air of being!—by giving it me with such effrontery that, if I had eminently done with him after his remarkable display, you at least were but the more determined to see him keep it up?"

The girl's justification, clearly, was very present to her, and not less obviously the truth that to make it strong she must, avoiding every side-issue, keep it very simple, "The only account I can give you, I think, is that I could but speak at such a moment as I felt, and that I felt—well, how can I say how deeply? If you can really bear to know, I feel so still I care in fact more than ever that we shouldn't do such things. I care, if you like, to indiscretion—I care, if you like, to offence, to arrogance, to folly. But even as my last word to you before you leave England on the conclusion of such a step, I'm ready to cry out to you that you oughtn't, you oughtn't, you oughtn't!"

Her father, with wonder-moved, elevated brows and high commanding hand, checked her as in an act really of violence—save that, like an inflamed young priestess, she had already, in essence, delivered her message. "Hallo, hallo, hallo, my distracted daughter—no 'crying out,' if you please!" After which, while arrested but unabashed, she still kept her lighted eyes on him, he gave back her conscious stare for a minute, inwardly and rapidly turning things over, making connections, taking, as after some long and lamentable lapse of observation, a new strange measure of her: all to the upshot of his then speaking with a difference of tone, a recognition of still more of the odious than he had supposed, so that the case might really call for some coolness. "You keep bad company, Grace—it pays the devil with your sense of proportion. If you make this row when I sell a picture, what will be left to you when I forge a cheque?"

"If you had arrived at the necessity of forging a cheque," she answered, "I should then resign myself to that of your selling a picture."

"But not short of that!"

"Not short of that. Not one of ours."

"But I couldn't," said his lordship with his best and coldest amusement, "sell one of somebody else's!"

She was, however, not disconcerted. "Other people do other things—they appear to have done them, and to be doing them, all about us. But we have been so decently different—always and ever. We've never done anything disloyal."

"'Disloyal'?"—he was more largely amazed and even interested now.

Lady Grace stuck to her word. "That's what it seems to me!"

"It seems to you"—and his sarcasm here was easy—"more disloyal to sell a picture than to buy one? Because we didn't paint 'em all ourselves, you know!"

She threw up impatient hands. "I don't ask you either to paint or to buy——!"

"Oh, that's a mercy!" he interrupted, riding his irony hard; "and I'm glad to hear you at least let me off such efforts! However, if it strikes you as gracefully filial to apply to your father's conduct so invidious a word," he went on less scathingly, "you must take from him, in your turn, his quite other view of what makes disloyalty—understanding distinctly, by the same token, that he enjoins on you not to give an odious illustration of it, while he's away, by discussing and deploring with any one of your extraordinary friends any aspect or feature whatever of his walk and conversation. That—pressed as I am for time," he went on with a glance at his watch while she remained silent—"is the main sense of what I have to say to you; so that I count on your perfect conformity. When you have told me that I may so count"—and casting about for his hat he espied it and went to take it up—"I shall more cordially bid you good-bye."

His daughter looked as if she had been for some time expecting the law thus imposed upon her—had been seeing where he must come out; but in spite of this preparation she made him wait for his reply in such tension as he had himself created. "To Kitty I've practically said nothing—and she herself can tell you why: I've in fact scarcely seen her this fortnight. Putting aside then Amy Sandgate, the only person to whom I've spoken—of your 'sacrifice,' as I suppose you'll let me call it?—is Mr. Hugh Crimble, whom you talk of as my 'confederate' at Dedborough."

Lord Theign recovered the name with relief. "Mr. Hugh Crimble—that's it!—whom you so amazingly caused to be present, and apparently invited to be active, at a business that so little concerned him."

"He certainly took upon himself to be interested, as I had hoped he would. But it was because I had taken upon my self—"

"To act, yes," Lord Theign broke in, "with the grossest want of delicacy! Well, it's from that exactly that you'll now forbear; and 'interested' as he may be—for which I'm deucedly obliged to him!—you'll not speak to Mr. Crimble again."

"Never again?"—the girl put it as for full certitude.

"Never of the question that I thus exclude. You may chatter your fill," said his lordship curtly, "about any others."

"Why, the particular question you forbid," Grace returned with great force, but as if saying something very reasonable—"that question is the question we care about: it's our very ground of conversation."

"Then," her father decreed, "your conversation will please to dispense with a ground; or you'll perhaps, better still—if that's the only way!—dispense with your conversation."

Lady Grace took a moment as if to examine this more closely. "You require of me not to communicate with Mr. Crimble at all?"

"Most assuredly I require it—since it's to that you insist on reducing me." He didn't look reduced, the master of Dedborough, as he spoke—which was doubtless precisely because he held his head so high to affirm what he suffered. "Is it so essential to your comfort," he demanded, "to hear him, or to make him, abuse me?"

"'Abusing' you, father dear, has nothing whatever to do with it!"—his daughter had fairly lapsed, with a despairing gesture, to the tenderness involved in her compassion for his perversity. "We look at the thing in a much larger way," she pursued, not heeding that she drew from him a sound of scorn for her "larger." "It's of our Treasure itself we talk—and of what can be done in such cases; though with a close application, I admit, to the case that you embody."

"Ah," Lord Theign asked as with absurd curiosity, "I embody a case?"

"Wonderfully, father—as you do everything; and it's the fact of its being exceptional," she explained, "that makes it so difficult to deal with."

His lordship had a gape for it. "'To deal with'? You're undertaking to 'deal' with me?"

She smiled more frankly now, as for a rift in the gloom. "Well, how can we help it if you will be a case?" And then as her tone but visibly darkened his wonder: "What we've set our hearts on is saving the picture."

"What you've set your hearts on, in other words, is working straight against me?"

But she persisted without heat. "What we've set our hearts on is working for England."

"And pray who in the world's 'England,'" he cried in his stupefaction, "unless I am?"

"Dear, dear father," she pleaded, "that's all we want you to be! I mean"—she didn't fear firmly to force it home—"in the real, the right, the grand sense; the sense that, you see, is so intensely ours."

"'Ours'?"—he couldn't but again throw back her word at her. "Isn't it, damn you, just in ours—?"

"No, no," she interrupted—"not in ours!" She smiled at him still, though it was strained, as if he really ought to perceive.

But he glared as at a senseless juggle. "What and who the devil are you talking about? What are 'we,' the whole blest lot of us, pray, but the best and most English thing in the country: people walking—and riding!—straight; doing, disinterestedly, most of the difficult and all the thankless jobs; minding their own business, above all, and expecting others to mind theirs?" So he let her "have" the stout sound truth, as it were—and so the direct force of it clearly might, by his view, have made her reel. "You and I, my lady, and your two decent brothers, God be thanked for them, and mine into the bargain, and all the rest, the jolly lot of us, take us together—make us numerous enough without any foreign aid or mixture: if that's what I understand you to mean!"

"You don't understand me at all—evidently; and above all I see you don't want to!" she had the bravery to add, "By 'our' sense of what's due to the nation in such a case I mean Mr. Crimble's and mine—and nobody's else at all; since, as I tell you, it's only with him I've talked."

It gave him then, every inch of him showed, the full, the grotesque measure of the scandal he faced. "So that 'you and Mr. Crimble' represent the standard, for me, in your opinion, of the proprieties and duties of our house?"

Well, she was too earnest—as she clearly wished to let him see—to mind his perversion of it. "I express to you the way we feel."

"It's most striking to hear, certainly, what you express"—he had positively to laugh for it; "and you speak of him, with your insufferable 'we,' as if you were presenting him as your—God knows what! You've enjoyed a large exchange of ideas, I gather, to have arrived at such unanimity." And then, as if to fall into no trap he might somehow be laying for her, she dropped all eagerness and rebutted nothing: "You must see a great deal of your fellow-critic not to be able to speak of yourself without him!"

"Yes, we're fellow-critics, father"—she accepted this opening. "I perfectly adopt your term." But it took her a minute to go further. "I saw Mr. Crim-ble here half an hour ago."

"Saw him 'here'?" Lord Theign amazedly asked. "He comes to you here—and Amy Sandgate has been silent?"

"It wasn't her business to tell you—since, you see, she could leave it to me. And I quite expect," Lady Grace then produced, "that he'll come again."

It brought down with a bang all her father's authority. "Then I simply exact of you that you don't see him."

The pause of which she paid it the deference was charged like a brimming cup. "Is that what you really meant by your condition just now—that when I do see him I shall not speak to him?"

"What I 'really meant' is what I really mean—that you bow to the law I lay upon you and drop the man altogether."

"Have nothing to do with him at all?"

"Have nothing to do with him at all."

"In fact"—she took it in—"give him wholly up."

He had an impatient gesture. "You sound as if I asked you to give up a fortune!" And then, though she had phrased his idea without consternation—verily as if it had been in the balance for her—he might have been moved by something that gathered in her eyes. "You're so wrapped up in him that the precious sacrifice is like that sort of thing?"

Lady Grace took her time—but showed, as her eyes continued to hold him, what had gathered. "I like Mr. Crimble exceedingly, father—I think him clever, intelligent, good; I want what he wants—I want it, I think, really, as much; and I don't at all deny that he has helped to make me so want it. But that doesn't matter. I'll wholly cease to see him, I'll give him up forever, if—if—!" She faltered, however, she hung fire with a smile that anxiously, intensely appealed. Then she began and stopped again, "If—if—!" while her father caught her up with irritation.

"'If,' my lady? If what, please?"

"If you'll withdraw the offer of our picture to Mr. Bender—and never make another to any one else!"

He stood staring as at the size of it—then translated it into his own terms. "If I'll obligingly announce to the world that I've made an ass of myself you'll kindly forbear from your united effort—the charming pair of you—to show me up for one?"

Lady Grace, as if consciously not caring or attempting to answer this, simply gave the first flare of his criticism time to drop. It wasn't till a minute passed that she said: "You don't agree to my compromise?"

Ah, the question but fatally sharpened at a stroke the stiffness of his spirit. "Good God, I'm to 'compromise' on top of everything?—I'm to let you browbeat me, haggle and bargain with me, over a thing that I'm entitled to settle with you as things have ever been settled among us, by uttering to you my last parental word?"

"You don't care enough then for what you name?"—she took it up as scarce heeding now what he said.

"For putting an end to your odious commerce—? I give you the measure, on the contrary," said Lord Theign, "of how much I care: as you give me, very strangely indeed, it strikes me, that of what it costs you—!" But his other words were lost in the hard long look at her from which he broke off in turn as for disgust.

It was with an effect of decently shielding herself—the unuttered meaning came so straight—that she substituted words of her own. "Of what it costs me to redeem the picture?"

"To lose your tenth-rate friend"—he spoke without scruple now.

She instantly broke into ardent deprecation, pleading at once and warning. "Father, father, oh—! You hold the thing in your hands."

He pulled up before her again as to thrust the responsibility straight back. "My orders then are so much rubbish to you?"

Lady Grace held her ground, and they remained face to face in opposition and accusation, neither making the other the sign of peace. But the girl at least had, in her way, held out the olive-branch, while Lord Theign had but reaffirmed his will. It was for her acceptance of this that he searched her, her last word not having yet come. Before it had done so, however, the door from the lobby opened and Mr. Gotch had regained their presence. This appeared to determine in Lady Grace a view of the importance of delay, which she signified to her companion in a "Well—I must think!" For the butler positively resounded, and Hugh was there.

"Mr. Crimble!" Mr. Gotch proclaimed—with the further extravagance of projecting the visitor straight upon his lordship.



VII

Our young man showed another face than the face his friend had lately seen him carry off, and he now turned it distressfully from that source of inspiration to Lord Theign, who was flagrantly, even from this first moment, no such source at all, and then from his noble adversary back again, under pressure of difficulty and effort, to Lady Grace, whom he directly addressed. "Here I am again, you see—and I've got my news, worse luck!" But his manner to her father was the next instant more brisk. "I learned you were here, my lord; but as the case is important I told them it was all right and came up. I've been to my club," he added for the girl, "and found the tiresome thing—!" But he broke down breathless.

"And it isn't good?" she cried with the highest concern.

Ruefully, yet not abjectly, he confessed, "Not so good as I hoped. For I assure you, my lord, I counted—"

"It's the report from Pappendick about the picture at Verona," Lady Grace interruptingly explained.

Hugh took it up, but, as we should well have seen, under embarrassment dismally deeper; the ugly particular defeat he had to announce showing thus, in his thought, for a more awkward force than any reviving possibilities that he might have begun to balance against them. "The man I told you about also," he said to his formidable patron; "whom I went to Brussels to talk with and who, most kindly, has gone for us to Verona. He has been able to get straight at their Mantovano, but the brute horribly wires me that he doesn't quite see the thing; see, I mean"—and he gathered his two hearers together now in his overflow of chagrin, conscious, with his break of the ice, more exclusively of that—"my vivid vital point, the absolute screaming identity of the two persons represented. I still hold," he persuasively went on, "that our man is their man, but Pappendick decides that he isn't—and as Pappendick has so much to be reckoned with of course I'm awfully abashed."

Lord Theign had remained what he had begun by being, immeasurably and inaccessibly detached—only with his curiosity more moved than he could help and as, on second thought, to see what sort of a still more offensive fool the heated youth would really make of himself. "Yes—you seem indeed remarkably abashed!"

Hugh clearly was thrown again, by the cold "cut" of this, colder than any mere social ignoring, upon a sense of the damnably poor figure he did offer; so that, while he straightened himself and kept a mastery of his manner and a control of his reply, we should yet have felt his cheek tingle. "I backed my own judgment strongly, I know—and I've got my snub. But I don't in the least knock under."

"Only the first authority in Europe doesn't care, I suppose, whether you do or not!"

"He isn't the first authority in Europe, thank God," the young man returned—"though he is, I admit, one of the three or four first. And I mean to appeal—I've another shot in my locker," he went on with his rather painfully forced smile to Lady Grace. "I had already written, you see, to dear old Bardi."

"Bardi of Milan?"—she recognised, it was admirably manifest, the appeal of his directness to her generosity, awkward as their predicament was also for her herself, and spoke to him as she might have spoken without her father's presence.

It would have shown for beautiful, on the spot, had there been any one to perceive it, that he devoutly recorded her intelligence. "You know of him?—how delightful of you! For the Italians, I now feel," he quickly explained, "he must have most the instinct—and it has come over me since that he'd have been more our man. Besides of course his so knowing the Verona picture."

She had fairly hung on his lips. "But does he know ours?"

"No—not ours yet. That is"—he consciously and quickly took himself up—"not yours! But as Pap-pendick went to Verona for us I've asked Bardi to do us the great favour to come here—if Lord Theign will be so good," he said, bethinking himself with a turn, "as to let him examine the Moretto." He faced again to the personage he mentioned, who, simply standing off and watching, in concentrated interest as well as detachment, this interview of his cool daughter and her still cooler guest, had plainly "elected," as it were, to give them rope to hang themselves. Staring very hard at Hugh he met his appeal, but in a silence clearly calculated; against which, however, the young man, bearing up, made such head as he could. He offered his next word, that is, equally to the two companions. "It's not at all impossible—for such curious effects have been!—that the Dedborough picture seen after the Verona will point a different moral from the Verona seen after the Dedborough."

"And so awfully long after—wasn't it?" Lady Grace asked.

"Awfully long after—it was years ago that Pappen-dick, being in this country for such purposes, was kindly admitted to your house when none of you were there, or at least visible."

"Oh of course we don't see every one!"—she heroically kept it up.

"You don't see every one," Hugh bravely laughed, "and that makes it all the more charming that you did, and that you still do, see me. I shall really get Bardi," he pursued, "to go again to Verona——"

"The last thing before coming here?"—she had guessed before he could say it; and still she sustained it, so that he could shine at her for assent. "How happy they should like so to work for you!"

"Ah, we're a band of brothers," he returned—"'we few, we happy few'—from country to country"; to which he added, gaining more ease for an eye at Lord Theign: "though we do have our little rubs and disputes, like Pappendick and me now. The thing, you see, is the ripping interest of it all; since," he developed and explained, for his elder friend's benefit, with pertinacious cheer and an assurance superficially at least recovered, "when we're really 'hit' over a case we'll do almost anything in life."

Lady Grace, recklessly throbbing in the breath of it all, immediately appropriated what her father let alone. "It must be so lovely to feel so hit!"

"It does spoil one," Hugh laughed, "for milder joys. Of course what I have to consider is the chance—putting it at the merest chance—of Bardi's own wet blanket! But that's again so very small—though," he pulled up with a drop to the comparative dismal, which he offered as an almost familiar tribute to Lord Theign, "you'll retort upon me naturally that I promised you the possibility of Pappendick's veto would be: all on the poor dear old basis, you'll claim, of the wish father to the thought. Well, I do wish to be right as much as I believe I am. Only give me time!" he sublimely insisted.

"How can we prevent your using it?" Lady Grace again interrupted; "or the fact either that if the worst comes to the worst—"

"The thing"—he at once pursued—"will always be at the least the greatest of Morettos? Ah," he cried so cheerily that there was still a freedom in it toward any it might concern, "the worst sha'n't come to the worst, but the best to the best: my conviction of which it is that supports me in the deep regret I have to express"—and he faced Lord Theign again—"for any inconvenience I may have caused you by my abortive undertaking. That, I vow here before Lady Grace, I will yet more than make up!"

Lord Theign, after the longest but the blankest contemplation of him, broke hereupon, for the first time, that attitude of completely sustained and separate silence which he had yet made compatible with his air of having deeply noted every element of the scene—so that it was of this full view his participation had effectively consisted, "I haven't the least idea, sir, what you're talking about!" And he squarely turned his back, strolling toward the other room, the threshold of which he the next moment had passed, remaining scantily within, however, and in sight of the others, not to say of ourselves; even though averted and ostensibly lost in some scrutiny that might have had for its object the great enshrined Lawrence.

There ensued upon his words and movement a vivid mute passage, the richest of commentaries, between his companions; who, deeply divided by the width of the ample room, followed him with their eyes and then used for their own interchange these organs of remark, eloquent now over Hugh's unmistakable dismissal at short order, on which obviously he must at once act. Lady Grace's young arms conveyed to him by a despairing contrite motion of surrender that she had done for him all she could do in his presence and that, however sharply doubtful the result, he was to leave the rest to herself. They communicated thus, the strenuous pair, for their full moment, without speaking; only with the prolonged, the charged give and take of their gaze and, it might well have been imagined, of their passion. Hugh had for an instant a show of hesitation—of the arrested impulse, while he kept her father within range, to launch at that personage before going some final remonstrance. It was the girl's raised hand and gesture of warning that waved away for him such a mistake; he decided, under her pressure, and after a last searching and answering look at her reached the door and let himself out. The stillness was then prolonged a minute by the further wait of the two others, Lord Theign where he had been standing and his daughter on the spot from which she had not moved. It presently ended in his lordship's turn about as if inferring by the silence that the intruder had withdrawn.

"Is that young man your lover?" he said as he drew again near.

Lady Grace waited a little, but spoke as quietly as if she had been prepared. "Has the question a bearing on the promise you a short time ago demanded of me?"

"It has a bearing on the so extraordinary appearance of your intimacy with him!"

"You mean that if he should be—what you ask me about—your exaction would then be modified?"

"My request that you break it short off? That request would, on the contrary," Lord Theign pronounced, "rest on an immense new ground. Therefore I insist on your telling me the truth."

"Won't the truth be before you, father, if you'll think a moment—without extravagance?" After which, while, as stiffly as ever—and it probably seemed to her impatience as stupidly—he didn't rise to it, she went on: "If I offered you not again to see him, does that make for you the appearance—?"

"If you offered it, you mean, on your condition—my promising not to sell? I promised," said Lord Theign, "absolutely nothing at all!"

She took him up with all expression. "So I promised as little! But that I should have been able to say what I did sufficiently meets your curiosity."

She might, wronged as she held herself, have felt him stupid not to see how wronged; but he was in any case acute for an evasion. "You risked your offer for the great equivalent over which you've so wildly worked yourself up."

"Yes, I've worked myself—that, I grant you and don't blush for! But hardly so much as to renounce my 'lover'—if," she prodigiously smiled, "I were so fortunate as to have one!"

"You renounced poor John mightily easily—whom you were so fortunate as to have!"

Her brows rose as high as his own had ever done. "Do you call Lord John my lover?"

"He was your suitor most assuredly," Lord Theign inimitably said, though without looking at her; "and as strikingly encouraged as he was respectfully ardent!"

"Encouraged by you, dear father, beyond doubt!"

"Encouraged—er—by every one: because you were (yes, you were!) encouraging. And what I ask of you now is a word of common candour as to whether you didn't, on your honour, turn him off because of your just then so stimulated views on the person who has been with us."

Grace replied but after an instant, as moved by more things than she could say—moved above all, in her trouble and her pity for him, by other things than harshness: "Oh father, father, father——!"

He searched her through all the compassion of her cry, but appeared to give way to her sincerity. "Well then if I have your denial I take it as answering my whole question—in a manner that satisfies me. If there's nothing, on your word, of that sort between you, you can all the more drop him."

"But you said a moment ago that I should all the more in the other case—that of there being something!"

He brushed away her logic-chopping. "If you're so keen then for past remarks I take up your own words—I accept your own terms for your putting an end to Mr. Crimble." To which, while, turning pale, she said nothing, he added: "You recognise that you profess yourself ready——"

"Not again to see him," she now answered, "if you tell me the picture's safe? Yes, I recognise that I was ready—as well as how scornfully little you then were!"

"Never mind what I then was—the question's of what I actually am, since I close with you on it The picture's therefore as safe as you please," Lord Theign pursued, "if you'll do what you just now engaged to."

"I engaged to do nothing," she replied after a pause; and the face she turned to him had grown suddenly tragic. "I've no word to take back, for none passed between us; but I won't do what I mentioned and what you at once laughed at Because," she finished, "the case is different."

"Different?" he almost shouted—"how, different?"

She didn't look at him for it, but she was none the less strongly distinct "He has been here—and that has done it He knows," she admirably emphasised.

"Knows what I think of him, no doubt—for a brazen young prevaricator! But what else?"

She still kept her eyes on a far-off point. "What he will have seen—that I feel we're too good friends."

"Then your denial of it's false," her father fairly thundered—"and you are infatuated?"

It made her the more quiet. "I like him very much."

"So that your row about the picture," he demanded with passion, "has been all a blind?" And then as her quietness still held her: "And his a blind as much—to help him to get at you?"

She looked at him again now. "He must speak for himself. I've said what I mean."

"But what the devil do you mean?" Lord Theign, taking in the hour, had reached the door as in supremely baffled conclusion and with a sense of time lamentably lost.

Their eyes met upon it all dreadfully across the wide space, and, hurried and incommoded as she saw him, she yet made him still stand a minute. Then she let everything go. "Do what you like with the picture!"

He jerked up his arm and guarding hand as before a levelled blow at his face, and with the other hand flung open the door, having done with her now and immediately lost to sight. Left alone she stood a moment looking before her; then with a vague advance, held apparently by a quickly growing sense of the implication of her act, reached a table where she remained a little, deep afresh in thought—only the next thing to fall into a chair close to it and there, with her elbows on it, yield to the impulse of covering her flushed face with her hands.



BOOK THIRD



I

HUGH CRIMBLE waited again in the Bruton Street drawing-room—this time at the afternoon hour; he restlessly shifted his place, looked at things about him without seeing them; all he saw, all he outwardly studied, was his own face and figure as he stopped an instant before a long glass suspended between two windows. Just as he turned from that brief and perhaps not wholly gratified inspection Lady Grace—that he had sent up his name to whom was immediately apparent—presented herself at the entrance from the other room. These young persons had hereupon no instant exchange of words; their exchange was mute—they but paused where they were; while the silence of each evidently tested the other for full confidence. A measure of this comfort came first, it would have appeared, to Hugh; though he then at once asked for confirmation of it.

"Am I right, Lady Grace, am I right?—to have come, I mean, after so many days of not hearing, not knowing, and perhaps, all too stupidly, not trying." And he went on as, still with her eyes on him, she didn't speak; though, only, we should have guessed, from her stress of emotion. "Even if I'm wrong, let me tell you, I don't care—simply because, whatever new difficulty I may have brought about for you here a fortnight ago, there's something that to-day adds to my doubt and my fear too great a pang, and that has made me feel I can scarce bear the suspense of them as they are."

The girl came nearer, and if her grave face expressed a pity it yet declined a dread. "Of what suspense do you speak? Your still being without the other opinion—?"

"Ah, that worries me, yes; and all the more, at this hour, as I say, that—" He dropped it, however: "I'll tell you in a moment! My real torment, all the while, has been not to know, from day to day, what situation, what complication that last scene of ours with your father here has let you in for; and yet at the same time—having no sign nor sound from you!—to see the importance of not making anything possibly worse by approaching you again, however discreetly. I've been in the dark," he pursued, "and feeling that I must leave you there; so that now—just brutally turning up once more under personal need and at any cost—I don't know whether I most want or most fear what I may learn from you."

Lady Grace, listening and watching, appeared to choose between different ways of meeting this appeal; she had a pacifying, postponing gesture, marked with a beautiful authority, a sign of the value for her of what she gave precedence to and which waved off everything else. "Have you had—first of all—any news yet of Bardi?"

"That I have is what has driven me straight at you again—since I've shown you before how I turn to you at a crisis. He has come as I hoped and like a regular good 'un," Hugh was able to state; "I've just met him at the station, but I pick him up again, at his hotel in Clifford Street, at five. He stopped, on his way from Dover this morning, to my extreme exasperation, to 'sample' Canterbury, and I leave him to a bath and a change and tea. Then swooping down I whirl him round to Bond Street, where his very first apprehension of the thing (an apprehension, oh I guarantee you, so quick and clean and fine and wise) will be the flash-light projected—well," said the young man, to wind up handsomely, but briefly and reasonably, "over the whole field of our question."

She panted with comprehension. "That of the two portraits being but the one sitter!"

"That of the two portraits being but the one sitter. With everything so to the good, more and more, that bangs in, up to the head, the golden nail of authenticity, and"—he quite glowed through his gloom for it—"we take our stand in glory on the last Mantovano in the world."

It was a presumption his friend visibly yearned for—but over which, too, with her eyes away from him, she still distinguished the shadow of a cloud. "That is if the flash-light comes!"

"That is if it comes indeed, confound it!"—he had to enlarge a little under the recall of past experience. "So now, at any rate, you see my tension!"

She looked at him again as with a vision too full for a waste of words. "While you on your side of course keep well in view Mr. Bender's."

"Yes, while I keep well in view Mr. Bender's; though he doesn't know, you see, of Bardi's being at hand."

"Still," said the girl, always all lucid for the case, "if the 'flash-light' does presently break——!"

"It will first take him in the eye?" Hugh had jumped to her idea, but he adopted it only to provide: "It might if he didn't now wear goggles, so to say!—clapped on him too hard by Pappendick's so damnably perverse opinion." With which, however, he quickly bethought himself. "Ah, of course, these wretched days, you haven't known of Pappendick's personal visit. After that wire from Verona I wired him back defiance—"

"And that brought him?" she cried.

"To do the honest thing, yes—I will say for him: to renew, for full assurance, his early memory of our picture."

She hung upon it. "But only to stick then to what he had telegraphed?"

"To declare that for him, lackaday! our thing's a pure Moretto—and to declare as much, moreover, with all the weight of his authority, to Bender himself, who of course made a point of seeing him."

"So that Bender"—she followed and wondered—"is, as a consequence, wholly off?"

It made her friend's humour play up in his acute-ness. "Bender, Lady Grace, is, by the law of his being, never 'wholly' off—or on!—anything. He lives, like the moon, in mid-air, shedding his silver light on earth; never quite gone, yet never all there—save for inappreciable moments. He would be in eclipse as a peril, I grant," Hugh went on—"if the question had struck him as really closed. But luckily the blessed Press—which is a pure heavenly joy and now quite immense on it—keeps it open as wide as Piccadilly."

"Which makes, however," Lady Grace discriminated, "for the danger of a grab."

"Ah, but all the more for the shame of a surrender! Of course I admit that when it's a question of a life spent, like his, in waiting, acquisitively, for the cat to jump, the only thing for one, at a given moment, as against that signal, is to be found one's self by the animal in the line of its trajectory. That's exactly," he laughed, "where we are!"

She cast about as intelligently to note the place. "Your great idea, you mean, has so worked—with the uproar truly as loud as it has seemed to come to us here?"

"All beyond my wildest hope," Hugh returned; "since the sight of the picture, flocked to every day by thousands, so beautifully tells. That we must at any cost keep it, that the nation must, and hang on to it tight, is the cry that fills the air—to the tune of ten letters a day in the Papers, with every three days a gorgeous leader; to say nothing of more and more passionate talk all over the place, some of it awfully wild, but all of it wind in our sails."

"I suppose it was that wind then that blew me round there to see the thing in its new light," Lady Grace said. "But I couldn't stay—for tears!"

"Ah," Hugh insisted on his side for comfort, "we'll crow loudest yet! And don't meanwhile, just don't, those splendid strange eyes of the fellow seem consciously to plead? The women, bless them, adore him, cling to him, and there's talk of a 'Ladies' League of Protest'—all of which keeps up the pitch."

"Poor Amy and I are a ladies' league," the girl joylessly joked—"as we now take in the 'Journal' regardless of expense."

"Oh then you practically have it all—since," Hugh, added after a brief hesitation, "I suppose Lord Theign himself doesn't languish uninformed."

"At far-off Salsomaggiore—by the papers? No doubt indeed he isn't spared even the worst," said Lady Grace—"and no doubt too it's a drag on his cure."

Her companion seemed struck with her lack of assurance. "Then you don't—if I may ask—hear from him?"

"I? Never a word."

"He doesn't write?" Hugh allowed himself to insist.

"He doesn't write. And I don't write either."

"And Lady Sandgate?" Hugh once more ventured.

"Doesn't she write?"

"Doesn't she hear?" said the young man, treating the other form of the question as a shade evasive.

"I've asked her not to tell me," his friend replied—"that is if he simply holds out."

"So that as she doesn't tell you"—Hugh was clear for the inference—"he of course does hold out." To which he added almost accusingly while his eyes searched her: "But your case is really bad."

She confessed to it after a moment, but as if vaguely enjoying it. "My case is really bad."

He had a vividness of impatience and contrition. 197

"And it's I who—all too blunderingly!—have made it so?"

"I've made it so myself," she said with a high head-shake, "and you, on the contrary—!" But here she checked her emphasis.

"Ah, I've so wanted, through our horrid silence, to help you!" And he pressed to get more at the truth. "You've so quite fatally displeased him?"

"To the last point—as I tell you. But it's not to that I refer," she explained; "it's to the ground of complaint I've given you." And then as this but left him blank, "It's time—it was at once time—that you should know," she pursued; "and yet if it's hard for me to speak, as you see, it was impossible for me to write. But there it is." She made her sad and beautiful effort. "The last thing before he left us I let the picture go."

"You mean—?" But he could only wonder—till, however, it glimmered upon him. "You gave up your protest?"

"I gave up my protest. I told him that—so far as I'm concerned!—he might do as he liked."

Her poor friend turned pale at the sharp little shock of it; but if his face thus showed the pang of too great a surprise he yet wreathed the convulsion in a gay grimace. "You leave me to struggle alone?"

"I leave you to struggle alone."

He took it in bewilderingly, but tried again, even to the heroic, for optimism. "Ah well, you decided, I suppose, on some new personal ground."

"Yes; a reason came up, a reason I hadn't to that extent looked for and which of a sudden—quickly, before he went—I had somehow to deal with. So to give him my word in the dismal sense I mention was my only way to meet the strain." She paused; Hugh waited for something further, and "I gave him my word I wouldn't help you," she wound up.

He turned it over. "To act in the matter—I see."

"To act in the matter"—she went through with it—"after the high stand I had taken."

Still he studied it. "I see—I see. It's between you and your father."

"It's between him and me—yes. An engagement not again to trouble him."

Hugh, from his face, might have feared a still greater complication; so he made, as he would probably have said, a jolly lot of this. "Ah, that was nice of you. And natural. That's all right!"

"No"—she spoke from a deeper depth—"it's altogether wrong. For whatever happens I must now accept it."

"Well, say you must"—he really declined not to treat it almost as rather a "lark"—"if we can at least go on talking."

"Ah, we can at least go on talking!" she perversely sighed. "I can say anything I like so long as I don't say it to him" she almost wailed. But she added with more firmness: "I can still hope—and I can still pray."

He set free again with a joyous gesture all his confidence. "Well, what more could you do, anyhow? So isn't that enough?"

It took her a moment to say, and even then she didn't. "Is it enough for you, Mr. Crimble?"

"What is enough for me"—he could for his part readily name it—"is the harm done you at our last meeting by my irruption; so that if you got his consent to see me——!"

"I didn't get his consent!"—she had turned away from the searching eyes, but she faced them again to rectify: "I see you against his express command."

"Ah then thank God I came!"—it was like a bland breath on a feu de joie: he flamed so much higher.

"Thank God you've come, yes—for my deplorable exposure." And to justify her name for it before he could protest, "I offered him here not to see you," she rigorously explained.

"'Offered him?"—Hugh did drop for it. "Not to see me—ever again?"

She didn't falter. "Never again."

Ah then he understood. "But he wouldn't let that serve——?"

"Not for the price I put on it."

"His yielding on the picture?"

"His yielding on the picture."

Hugh lingered before it all. "Your proposal wasn't 'good enough'?"

"It wasn't good enough."

"I see," he repeated—"I see." But he was in that light again mystified. "Then why are you therefore not free?"

"Because—just after—you came back, and I did see you again!"

Ah, it was all present. "You found you were too sorry for me?"

"I found I was too sorry for you—as he himself found I was."

Hugh had got hold of it now. "And that, you mean, he couldn't stomach?"

"So little that when you had gone (and how you had to go you remember) he at once proposed, rather than that I should deceive you in a way so different from his own——"

"To do all we want of him?"

"To do all I did at least."

"And it was then," he took in, "that you wouldn't deal?"

"Well"—try though she might to keep the colour out, it all came straighter and straighter now—"those moments had brought you home to me as they had also brought him; making such a difference, I felt, for what he veered round to agree to."

"The difference"—Hugh wanted it so adorably definite—"that you didn't see your way to accepting——?"

"No, not to accepting the condition he named."

"Which was that he'd keep the picture for you if you'd treat me as too 'low'——?"

"If I'd treat you," said Lady Grace with her eyes on his fine young face, "as impossible."

He kept her eyes—he clearly liked so to make her repeat it. "And not even for the sake of the picture—?" After he had given her time, however, her silence, with her beautiful look in it, seemed to admonish him not to force her for his pleasure; as if what she had already told him didn't make him throb enough for the wonder of it. He had it, and let her see by his high flush how he made it his own—while, the next thing, as it was but part of her avowal, the rest of that illumination called for a different intelligence. "Your father's reprobation of me personally is on the ground that you're all such great people?"

She spared him the invidious answer to this as, a moment before, his eagerness had spared her reserve; she flung over the "ground" that his question laid bare the light veil of an evasion, "'Great people,' I've learned to see, mustn't—to remain great—do what my father's doing."

"It's indeed on the theory of their not so behaving," Hugh returned, "that we see them—all the inferior rest of us—in the grand glamour of their greatness!"

If he had spoken to meet her admirable frankness half-way, that beauty in her almost brushed him aside to make at a single step the rest of the journey. "You won't see them in it for long—if they don't now, under such tests and with such opportunities, begin to take care."

This had given him, at a stroke, he clearly felt, all freedom for the closer criticism. "Lord Theign perhaps recognises some such canny truth, but 'takes care,' with the least trouble to himself and the finest short cut—does it, if you'll let me say so, rather on the cheap—by finding 'the likes' of me, as his daughter's trusted friend, out of the question."

"Well, you won't mind that, will you?" Lady Grace asked, "if he finds his daughter herself, in any such relation to you, quite as much so."

"Different enough, from position to position and person to person," he brightly brooded, "is the view that gets itself most comfortably taken of the implications of Honour!"

"Yes," the girl returned; "my father, in the act of despoiling us all, all who are interested, without apparently the least unpleasant consciousness, keeps the balance showily even, to his mostly so fine, so delicate sense, by suddenly discovering that he's scandalised at my caring for your friendship."

Hugh looked at her, on this, as with the gladness verily of possession promised and only waiting—or as if from that moment forth he had her assurance of everything that most concerned him and that might most inspire. "Well, isn't the moral of it all simply that what his perversity of pride, as we can only hold it, will have most done for us is to bring us—and to keep us—blessedly together?"

She seemed for a moment to question his "simply." "Do you regard us as so much 'together' when you remember where, in spite of everything, I've put myself?"

"By telling him to do what he likes?" he recalled without embarrassment. "Oh, that wasn't in spite of 'everything'—it was only in spite of the Manto-vano."

"'Only'?" she flushed—"when I've given the picture up?"

"Ah," Hugh cried, "I don't care a hang for the picture!" And then as she let him, closer, close to her with this, possess himself of her hands: "We both only care, don't we, that we're given to each other thus? We both only care, don't we, that nothing can keep us apart?"

"Oh, if you've forgiven me—!" she sighed into his fond face.

"Why, since you gave the thing up for me," he pleadingly laughed, "it isn't as if you had given me up——!"

"For anything, anything? Ah never, never!" she breathed.

"Then why aren't we all right?"

"Well, if you will——!"

"Oh for ever and ever and ever!"—and with this ardent cry of his devotion his arms closed in their strength and she was clasped to his breast and to his lips.

The next moment, however, she had checked him with the warning "Amy Sandgate!"—as if she had heard their hostess enter the other room. Lady Sand-gate was in fact almost already upon them—their disjunction had scarce been effected and she had reached the nearer threshold. They had at once put the widest space possible between them—a little of the flurry of which transaction agitated doubtless their clutch at composure. They gave back a shade awkwardly and consciously, on one side and the other, the speculative though gracious attention she for a few moments made them and their recent intimate relation the subject of; from all of which indeed Lady Grace sought and found cover in a prompt and responsible address to Hugh. "Mustn't you go without more delay to Clifford Street?"

He came back to it all alert "At once!" He had recovered his hat and reached the other door, whence he gesticulated farewell to the elder lady. "Please pardon me"—and he disappeared.

Lady Sandgate hereupon stood for a little silently confronted with the girl. "Have you freedom of mind for the fact that your father's suddenly at hand?"

"He has come back?"—Lady Grace was sharply struck.

"He arrives this afternoon and appears to go straight to Kitty—according to a wire that I find downstairs on coming back late from my luncheon. He has returned with a rush—as," said his correspondent in the elation of triumph, "I was sure he would!"

Her young friend was more at sea. "Brought back, you mean, by the outcry—even though he so hates it?"

But she was more and more all lucidity—save in so far as she was now almost all authority. "Ah, hating still more to seem afraid, he has come back to face the music!"

Lady Grace, turning away as in vague despair for the manner in which the music might affect him, yet wheeled about again, after thought, to a positive recognition and even to quite an inconsequent pride. "Yes—that's dear old father!"

And what was Lady Sandgate moreover but mistress now of the subject? "At the point the row has reached he couldn't stand it another day; so he has thrown up his cure and—lest we should oppose him!—not even announced his start."

"Well," her companion returned, "now that I've done it all I shall never oppose him again!"

Lady Sandgate appeared to show herself as still under the impression she might have received on entering. "He'll only oppose you!"

"If he does," said Lady Grace, "we're at present two to bear it."

"Heaven save us then"—the elder woman was quick, was even cordial, for the sense of this—"your good friend is clever!"

Lady Grace honoured the remark. "Mr. Crim-ble's remarkably clever."

"And you've arranged——?"

"We haven't arranged—but we've understood. So that, dear Amy, if you understand—!" Lady Grace paused, for Gotch had come in from the hall.

"His lordship has arrived?" his mistress immediately put to him.

"No, my lady, but Lord John has—to know if he's expected here, and in that case, by your ladyship's leave, to come up."

Her ladyship turned to the girl. "May Lord John—as we do await your father—come up?"

"As suits you, please!"

"He may come up," said Lady Sandgate to Gotch. "His lordship's expected." She had a pause till they were alone again, when she went on to her companion: "You asked me just now if I understood. Well—I do understand!"

Lady Grace, with Gotch's withdrawal, which left the door open, had reached the passage to the other room. "Then you'll excuse me!"—she made her escape.



II

Lord John, reannounced the next instant from the nearest quarter and quite waiving salutations, left no doubt of the high pitch of his eagerness and tension as soon as the door had closed behind him. "What on earth then do you suppose he has come back to do—?" To which he added while his hostess's gesture impatiently disclaimed conjecture: "Because when a fellow really finds himself the centre of a cyclone——!"

"Isn't it just at the centre," she interrupted, "that you keep remarkably still, and only in the suburbs that you feel the rage? I count on dear Theign's doing nothing in the least foolish—!"

"Ah, but he can't have chucked everything for nothing," Lord John sharply returned; "and wherever you place him in the rumpus he can't not meet somehow, hang it, such an assault on his character as a great nobleman and good citizen."

"It's his luck to have become with the public of the newspapers the scapegoat-in-chief: for the sins, so-called, of a lot of people!" Lady Sandgate inconclusively sighed.

"Yes," Lord John concluded for her, "the mercenary millions on whose traffic in their trumpery values—when they're so lucky as to have any!—this isn't a patch!"

"Oh, there are cases and cases: situations and responsibilities so intensely differ!"—that appeared on the whole, for her ladyship, the moral to be gathered.

"Of course everything differs, all round, from everything," Lord John went on; "and who in the world knows anything of his own case but the victim of circumstances exposing himself, for the highest and purest motives, to be literally torn to pieces?"

"Well," said Lady Sandgate as, in her strained suspense, she freshly consulted her bracelet watch, "I hope he isn't already torn—if you tell me you've been to Kitty's."

"Oh, he was all right so far: he had arrived and gone out again," the young man explained, "as Lady Imber hadn't been at home."

"Ah cool Kitty!" his hostess sighed again—but diverted, as she spoke, by the reappearance of her butler, this time positively preceding Lord Theign, whom she met, when he presently stood before her, his garb of travel exchanged for consummate afternoon dress, with yearning tenderness and compassionate curiosity. "At last, dearest friend—what a joy! But with Kitty not at home to receive you?"

That young woman's parent made light of it for the indulged creature's sake. "Oh I knew my Kitty! I dressed and I find her at five-thirty." To which he added as he only took in further, without expression, Lord John: "But Bender, who came there before my arrival—he hasn't tried for me here?"

It was a point on which Lord John himself could at least be expressive. "I met him at the club at luncheon; he had had your letter—but for which chance, my dear man, I should have known nothing. You'll see him all right at this house; but I'm glad, if I may say so, Theign," the speaker pursued with some emphasis—"I'm glad, you know, to get hold of you first."

Lord Theign seemed about to ask for the meaning of this remark, but his other companion's apprehension had already overflowed. "You haven't come back, have you—to whatever it may be!—for trouble of any sort with Breckenridge?"

His lordship transferred his penetration to this fair friend, "Have you become so intensely absorbed—these remarkable days!—in 'Breckenridge'?"

She felt the shadow, you would have seen, of his claimed right, or at least privilege, of search—yet easily, after an instant, emerged clear. "I've thought and dreamt but of you—suspicious man!—in proportion as the clamour has spread; and Mr. Bender meanwhile, if you want to know, hasn't been near me once!"

Lord John came in a manner, and however unconsciously, to her aid. "You'd have seen, if he had been, what's the matter with him, I think—and what perhaps Theign has seen from his own letter: since," he went on to his fellow-visitor, "I understood him a week ago to have been much taken up with writing you."

Lord Theign received this without comment, only again with an air of expertly sounding the speaker; after which he gave himself afresh for a moment to Lady Sandgate. "I've not come home for any clamour, as you surely know me well enough to believe; or to notice for a minute the cheapest insolence and aggression—which frankly scarce reached me out there; or which, so far as it did, I was daily washed clean of by those blest waters. I returned on Mr. Bender's letter," he then vouchsafed to Lord John—"three extraordinarily vulgar pages about the egregious Pap-pendick!"

"About his having suddenly turned up in person, yes, and, as Breckenridge says, marked the picture down?"—the young man was clearly all-knowing. "That has of course weighed on Bender—being confirmed apparently, on the whole, by the drift of public opinion."

Lord Theign took, on this, with a frank show of reaction from some of his friend's terms, a sharp turn off; he even ironically indicated the babbler or at least the blunderer in question to Lady Sandgate. "He too has known me so long, and he comes here to talk to me of 'the drift of public opinion'!" After which he quite charged at his vain informant. "Am I to tell you again that I snap my fingers at the drift of public opinion?—which is but another name for the chatter of all the fools one doesn't know, in addition to all those (and plenty of 'em!) one damnably does."

Lady Sandgate, by a turn of the hand, dropped oil from her golden cruse. "Ah, you did that, in your own grand way, before you went abroad!"

"I don't speak of the matter, my dear man, in the light of its effect on you," Lord John importantly explained—"but in the light of its effect on Bender; who so consumedly wants the picture, if he is to have it, to be a Mantovano, but seems unable to get it taken at last for anything but the fine old Moretto that of course it has always been."

Lord Theign, in growing disgust at the whole beastly complication, betrayed more and more the odd pitch of the temper that had abruptly restored him with such incalculable weight to the scene of action. "Well, isn't a fine old Moretto good enough for him; confound him?"

It pulled up not a little Lord John, who yet made his point. "A fine old Moretto, you know, was exactly what he declined at Dedborough—for its comparative, strictly comparative, insignificance; and he only thought of the picture when the wind began to rise for the enormous rarity—"

"That that mendacious young cad who has bamboozled Grace," Lord Theign broke in, "tried to befool us, for his beggarly reasons, into claiming for it?"

Lady Sandgate renewed her mild influence. "Ah, the knowing people haven't had their last word—the possible Mantovano isn't exploded yet!" Her noble friend, however, declined the offered spell. "I've had enough of the knowing people—the knowing people are serpents! My picture's to take or to leave—and it's what I've come back, if you please, John, to say to your man to his face."

This declaration had a report as sharp and almost as multiplied as the successive cracks of a discharged revolver; yet when the light smoke cleared Lady Sand-gate at least was still left standing and smiling. "Yes, why in mercy's name can't he choose which?—and why does he write him, dreadful Breckenridge, such tiresome argumentative letters?"

Lord John took up her idea as with the air of something that had been working in him rather vehemently, though under due caution too, as a consequence of this exchange, during which he had apprehensively watched his elder. "I don't think I quite see how, my dear Theign, the poor chap's letter was so offensive."

In that case his dear Theign could tell him. "Because it was a tissue of expressions that may pass current—over counters and in awful newspapers—in his extraordinary world or country, but that I decline to take time to puzzle out here."

"If he didn't make himself understood," Lord John took leave to laugh, "it must indeed have been an unusual production for Bender."

"Oh, I often, with the wild beauty, if you will, of so many of his turns, haven't a notion," Lady Sandgate confessed with an equal gaiety, "of what he's talking about."

"I think I never miss his weird sense," her younger guest again loyally contended—"and in fact as a general thing I rather like it!"

"I happen to like nothing that I don't enjoy," Lord Theign rejoined with some asperity—"and so far as I do follow the fellow he assumes on my part an interest in his expenditure of purchase-money that I neither feel nor pretend to. He doesn't want—by what I spell out—the picture he refused at Dedborough; he may possibly want—if one reads it so—the picture on view in Bond Street; and he yet appears to make, with great emphasis, the stupid ambiguous point that these two 'articles' (the greatest of Morettos an 'article'!) haven't been 'by now' proved different: as if I engaged with him that I myself would so prove them!"

Lord John indulged in a pause—but also in a suggestion. "He must allude to your hoping—when you allowed us to place the picture with Mackintosh—that it would show to all London in the most precious light conceivable."

"Well, if it hasn't so shown"—and Lord Theign stared as if mystified—"what in the world's the meaning of this preposterous racket?"

"The racket is largely," his young friend explained, "the vociferation of the people who contradict each other about it."

On which their hostess sought to enliven the gravity of the question. "Some—yes—shouting on the housetops that's a Mantovano of the Mantovanos, and others shrieking back at them that they're donkeys if not criminals."

"He may take it for whatever he likes," said Lord Theign, heedless of these contributions, "he may father it on Michael Angelo himself if he'll but clear out with it and let me alone!"

"What he'd like to take it for," Lord John at this point saw his way to remark, "is something in the nature of a Hundred Thousand."

"A Hundred Thousand?" cried his astonished friend.

"Quite, I dare say, a Hundred Thousand"—the young man enjoyed clearly handling even by the lips so round a sum.

Lady Sandgate disclaimed however with agility any appearance of having gaped. "Why, haven't you yet realised, Theign, that those are the American figures?"

His lordship looked at her fixedly and then did the same by Lord John, after which he waited a little. "I've nothing to do with the American figures—which seem to me, if you press me, you know, quite intolerably vulgar."

"Well, I'd be as vulgar as anybody for a Hundred Thousand!" Lady Sandgate hastened to proclaim.

"Didn't he let us know at Dedborough," Lord John asked of the master of that seat, "that he had no use, as he said, for lower values?"

"I've heard him remark myself," said their companion, rising to the monstrous memory, "that he wouldn't take a cheap picture—even though a 'handsome' one—as a present."

"And does he call the thing round the corner a cheap picture?" the proprietor of the work demanded.

Lord John threw up his arms with a grin of impatience. "All he wants to do, don't you see? is to prevent your making it one!"

Lord Theign glared at this imputation to him of a low ductility. "I offered the thing, as it was, at an estimate worthy of it—and of me."

"My dear reckless friend," his young adviser protested, "you named no figure at all when it came to the point——!"

"It didn't come to the point! Nothing came to the point but that I put a Moretto on view; as a thing, yes, perfectly"—Lord Theign accepted the reminding gesture—"on which a rich American had an eye and in which he had, so to speak, an interest. That was what I wanted, and so we left it—parting each of us ready but neither of us bound."

"Ah, Mr. Bender's bound, as he'd say," Lady Sand-gate interposed—"'bound' to make you swallow the enormous luscious plum that your appetite so morbidly rejects!"

"My appetite, as morbid as you like"—her old friend had shrewdly turned on her—"is my own affair, and if the fellow must deal in enormities I warn him to carry them elsewhere!"

Lord John, plainly, by this time, was quite exasperated at the absurdity of him. "But how can't you see that it's only a plum, as she says, for a plum and an eye for an eye—since the picture itself, with this huge ventilation, is now quite a different affair?"

"How the deuce a different affair when just what the man himself confesses is that, in spite of all the chatter of the prigs and pedants, there's no really established ground for treating it as anything but the same?" On which, as having so unanswerably spoken, Lord Theign shook himself free again, in his high petulance, and moved restlessly to where the passage to the other room appeared to offer his nerves an issue; all moreover to the effect of suggesting to us that something still other than what he had said might meanwhile work in him behind and beneath that quantity. The spectators of his trouble watched him, for the time, in uncertainty and with a mute but associated comment on the perversity and oddity he had so suddenly developed; Lord John giving a shrug of almost bored despair and Lady Sandgate signalling caution and tact for their action by a finger flourished to her lips, and in fact at once proceeding to apply these arts. The subject of her attention had still remained as in worried thought; he had even mechanically taken up a book from a table—which he then, after an absent glance at it, tossed down.

"You're so detached from reality, you adorable dreamer," she began—"and unless you stick to that you might as well have done nothing. What you call the pedantry and priggishness and all the rest of it is exactly what poor Breckenridge asked almost on his knees, wonderful man, to be allowed to pay you for; since even if the meddlers and chatterers haven't settled anything for those who know—though which of the elect themselves after all does seem to know?—it's a great service rendered him to have started such a hare to run!"

Lord John took freedom to throw off very much the same idea. "Certainly his connection with the whole question and agitation makes no end for his glory."

It didn't, that remark, bring their friend back to him, but it at least made his indifference flash with derision. "His 'glory'—Mr. Bender's glory? Why, they quite universally loathe him—judging by the stuff they print!"

"Oh, here—as a corrupter of our morals and a promoter of our decay, even though so many are flat on their faces to him—yes! But it's another affair over there where the eagle screams like a thousand steam-whistles and the newspapers flap like the leaves of the forest: there he'll be, if you'll only let him, the biggest thing going; since sound, in that air, seems to mean size, and size to be all that counts. If he said of the thing, as you recognise," Lord John went on, "'It's going to be a Mantovano,' why you can bet your life that it is—that it has got to be some kind of a one."

His fellow-guest, at this, drew nearer again, irritated, you would have been sure, by the unconscious infelicity of the pair—worked up to something quite openly wilful and passionate. "No kind of a furious flaunting one, under my patronage, that I can prevent, my boy! The Dedborough picture in the market—owing to horrid little circumstances that regard myself alone—is the Dedborough picture at a decent, sufficient, civilised Dedborough price, and nothing else whatever; which I beg you will take as my last word on the subject."

Lord John, trying whether he could take it, momentarily mingled his hushed state with that of their hostess, to whom he addressed a helpless look; after which, however, he appeared to find that he could only reassert himself. "May I nevertheless reply that I think you'll not be able to prevent anything?—since the discussed object will completely escape your control in New York!"

"And almost any discussed object"—Lady Sand-gate rose to the occasion also—"is in New York, by what one hears, easily worth a Hundred Thousand!"

Lord Theign looked from one of them to the other. "I sell the man a Hundred Thousand worth of swagger and advertisement; and of fraudulent swagger and objectionable advertisement at that?"

"Well"—Lord John was but briefly baffled—"when the picture's his you can't help its doing what it can and what it will for him anywhere!"

"Then it isn't his yet," the elder man retorted—"and I promise you never will be if he has sent you to me with his big drum!"

Lady Sandgate turned sadly on this to her associate in patience, as if the case were now really beyond them. "Yes, how indeed can it ever become his if Theign simply won't let him pay for it?"

Her question was unanswerable. "It's the first time in all my life I've known a man feel insulted, in such a piece of business, by happening not to be, in the usual way, more or less swindled!"

"Theign is unable to take it in," her ladyship explained, "that—as I've heard it said of all these money-monsters of the new type—Bender simply can't afford not to be cited and celebrated as the biggest buyer who ever lived."

"Ah, cited and celebrated at my expense—say it at once and have it over, that I may enjoy what you all want to do to me!"

"The dear man's inimitable—at his 'expense'!" It was more than Lord John could bear as he fairly flung himself off in his derisive impotence and addressed his wail to Lady Sandgate.

"Yes, at my expense is exactly what I mean," Lord Theign asseverated—"at the expense of my modest claim to regulate my behaviour by my own standards. There you perfectly are about the man, and it's precisely what I say—that he's to hustle and harry me because he's a money-monster: which I never for a moment dreamed of, please understand, when I let you, John, thrust him at me as a pecuniary resource at Dedborough. I didn't put my property on view that he might blow about it———!"

"No, if you like it," Lady Sandgate returned; "but you certainly didn't so arrange"—she seemed to think her point somehow would help—"that you might blow about it yourself!"

"Nobody wants to 'blow,'" Lord John more stoutly interposed, "either hot or cold, I take it; but I really don't see the harm of Bender's liking to be known for the scale of his transactions—actual or merely imputed even, if you will; since that scale is really so magnificent."

Lady Sandgate half accepted, half qualified this plea. "The only question perhaps is why he doesn't try for some precious work that somebody—less delicious than dear Theign—can be persuaded on bended knees to accept a hundred thousand for."

"'Try' for one?"—her younger visitor took it up while her elder more attentively watched him. "That was exactly what he did try for when he pressed you so hard in vain for the great Sir Joshua."

"Oh well, he mustn't come back to that—must he, Theign?" her ladyship cooed.

That personage failed to reply, so that Lord John went on, unconscious apparently of the still more suspicious study to which he exposed himself. "Besides which there are no things of that magnitude knocking about, don't you know?—they've got to be worked up first if they're to reach the grand publicity of the Figure! Would you mind," he continued to his noble monitor, "an agreement on some such basis as this?—that you shall resign yourself to the biggest equivalent you'll squeamishly consent to take, if it's at the same time the smallest he'll squeamishly consent to offer; but that, that done, you shall leave him free——"

Lady Sandgate took it up straight, rounding it off, as their companion only waited. "Leave him free to talk about the sum offered and the sum taken as practically one and the same?"

"Ah, you know," Lord John discriminated, "he doesn't 'talk' so much himself—there's really nothing blatant or crude about poor Bender. It's the rate at which—by the very way he's 'fixed': an awful way indeed, I grant you!—a perfect army of reporter-wretches, close at his heels, are always talking for him and of him."

Lord Theign spoke hereupon at last with the air as of an impulse that had been slowly gathering force. "You talk for him, my dear chap, pretty well. You urge his case, my honour, quite as if you were assured of a commission on the job—on a fine ascending scale! Has he put you up to that proposition, eh? Do you get a handsome percentage and are you to make a good thing of it?"

The young man coloured under this stinging pleasantry—whether from a good conscience affronted or from a bad one made worse; but he otherwise showed a bold front, only bending his eyes a moment on his watch. "As he's to come to you himself—and I don't know why the mischief he doesn't come!—he will answer you that graceful question."

"Will he answer it," Lord Theign asked, "with the veracity that the suggestion you've just made on his behalf represents him as so beautifully adhering to?" On which he again quite fiercely turned his back and recovered his detachment, the others giving way behind him to a blanker dismay.

Lord John, in spite of this however, pumped up a tone. "I don't see why you should speak as if I were urging some abomination."

"Then I'll tell you why!"—and Lord Theign was upon him again for the purpose. "Because I had rather give the cursed thing away outright and for good and all than that it should hang out there another day in the interest of such equivocations!"

Lady Sandgate's dismay yielded to her wonder, and her wonder apparently in turn to her amusement. "'Give it away,' my dear friend, to a man who only longs to smother you in gold?"

Her dear friend, however, had lost patience with her levity. "Give it away—just for a luxury of protest and a stoppage of chatter—to some cause as unlike as possible that of Mr. Bender's power of sound and his splendid reputation: to the Public, to the Authorities, to the Thingumbob, to the Nation!"

Lady Sandgate broke into horror while Lord John stood sombre and stupefied. "Ah, my dear creature, you've flights of extravagance——!"

"One thing's very certain," Lord Theign quite heedlessly pursued—"that the thought of my property on view there does give intolerably on my nerves, more and more every minute that I'm conscious of it; so that, hang it, if one thinks of it, why shouldn't I, for my relief, do again, damme, what I like?—that is bang the door in their faces, have the show immediately stopped?" He turned with the attraction of this idea from one of his listeners to the other. "It's my show—it isn't Bender's, surely!—and I can do just as I choose with it."

"Ah, but isn't that the very point?"—and Lady Sandgate put it to Lord John. "Isn't it Bender's show much more than his?"

Her invoked authority, however, in answer to this, made but a motion of disappointment and disgust at so much rank folly—while Lord Theign, on the other hand, followed up his happy thought. "Then if it's Bender's show, or if he claims it is, there's all the more reason!" And it took his lordship's inspiration no longer to flower. "See here, John—do this: go right round there this moment, please, and tell them from me to shut straight down!"

"'Shut straight down'?" the young man abhorrently echoed.

"Stop it to-night—wind it up and end it: see?" The more the entertainer of that vision held it there the more charm it clearly took on for him. "Have the picture removed from view and the incident closed."

"You seriously ask that of me!" poor Lord John quavered.

"Why in the world shouldn't I? It's a jolly lot less than you asked of me a month ago at Dedborough."

"What then am I to say to them?" Lord John spoke but after a long moment, during which he had only looked hard and—an observer might even then have felt—ominously at his taskmaster.

That personage replied as if wholly to have done with the matter. "Say anything that comes into your clever head. I don't really see that there's anything else for you!" Lady Sandgate sighed to the messenger, who gave no sign save of positive stiffness.

The latter seemed still to weigh his displeasing obligation; then he eyed his friend significantly—almost portentously. "Those are absolutely your sentiments?"

"Those are absolutely my sentiments"—and Lord Theign brought this out as with the force of a physical push.

"Very well then!" But the young man, indulging in a final, a fairly sinister, study of such a dealer in the arbitrary, made sure of the extent, whatever it was, of his own wrong. "Not one more day?"

Lord Theign only waved him away. "Not one more hour!"

He paused at the door, this reluctant spokesman, as if for some supreme protest; but after another prolonged and decisive engagement with the two pairs of eyes that waited, though differently, on his performance, he clapped on his hat as in the rage of his resentment and departed on his mission.



III

"He can't bear to do it, poor man!" Lady Sand-gate ruefully remarked to her remaining guest after Lord John had, under extreme pressure, dashed out to Bond Street.

"I dare say not!"—Lord Theign, flushed with the felicity of self-expression, made little of that. "But he goes too far, you see, and it clears the air—pouah! Now therefore"—and he glanced at the clock—"I must go to Kitty."

"Kitty—with what Kitty wants," Lady Sandgate opined—"won't thank you for that!"

"She never thanks me for anything"—and the fact of his resignation clearly added here to his bitterness. "So it's no great loss!"

"Won't you at any rate," his hostess asked, "wait for Bender?"

His lordship cast it to the winds. "What have I to do with him now?"

"Why surely if he'll accept your own price—!"

Lord Theign thought—he wondered; and then as if fairly amused at himself: "Hanged if I know what is my own price!" After which he went for his hat. "But there's one thing," he remembered as he came back with it: "where's my too, too unnatural daughter?"

"If you mean Grace and really want her I'll send and find out."

"Not now"—he bethought himself. "But does she see that chatterbox?"

"Mr. Crimble? Yes, she sees him."

He kept his eyes on her. "Then how far has it gone?"

Lady Sandgate overcame an embarrassment. "Well, not even yet, I think, so far as they'd like."

"They'd 'like'—heaven save the mark!—to marry?"

"I suspect them of it. What line, if it should come to that," she asked, "would you then take?"

He was perfectly prompt. "The line that for Grace it's simply ignoble."

The force of her deprecation of such language was qualified by tact. "Ah, darling, as dreadful as that?"

He could but view the possibility with dark resentment. "It lets us so down—from what we've always been and done; so down, down, down that I'm amazed you don't feel it!"

"Oh, I feel there's still plenty to keep you up!" she soothingly laughed.

He seemed to consider this vague amount—which he apparently judged, however, not so vast as to provide for the whole yearning of his nature. "Well, my dear," he thus more blandly professed, "I shall need all the extra agrement that your affection can supply."

If nothing could have been, on this, richer response, nothing could at the same time have bee more pleasing than her modesty. "Ah, my affectionate Theign, is, as I think you know, a fountain always in flood; but in any more worldly element than that—as you've ever seen for yourself—a poor strand with my own sad affairs, a broken reed; not 'great' as they used so finely to call it! You are—with the natural sense of greatness and, for supreme support, the instinctive grand man doing and taking things."

He sighed, none the less, he groaned, with his thoughts of trouble, for the strain he foresaw on these resolutions. "If you mean that I hold up my head, on higher grounds, I grant that I always have. But how much longer possible when my children commit such vulgarities? Why in the name of goodness are such children? What the devil has got into them, and is it really the case that when Grace offers as a proof of her license and a specimen of her taste a son-in-law as you tell me I'm in danger of helplessly to swallow the dose?"

"Do you find Mr. Crimble," Lady Sandgate as if there might really be something to say, "so utterly out of the question?"

"I found him on the two occasions before I went away in the last degree offensive and outrageous; but even if he charged one and one's poor dear decent old defences with less rabid a fury everything about him would forbid that kind of relation."

What kind of relation, if any, Hugh's deficiencies might still render thinkable Lord Theign was kept from going on to mention by the voice of Mr. Gotch, who had thrown open the door to the not altogether assured sound of "Mr. Breckenridge Bender." The guest in possession gave a cry of impatience, but Lady Sandgate said "Coming up?"

"If his lordship will see him."

"Oh, he's beyond his time," his lordship pronounced—"I can't see him now!"

"Ah, but mustn't you—and mayn't I then?" She waited, however, for no response to signify to her servant "Let him come," and her companion could but exhale a groan of reluctant accommodation as if he wondered at the point she made of it. It enlightened him indeed perhaps a little that she went on while Gotch did her bidding. "Does the kind of relation you'd be condemned to with Mr. Crimble let you down, down, down, as you say, more than the relation you've been having with Mr. Bender?"

Lord Theign had for it the most uninforming of stares. "Do you mean don't I hate 'em equally both?"

She cut his further reply short, however, by a "Hush!" of warning—Mr. Bender was there and his introducer had left them.

Lord Theign, full of his purpose of departure, sacrificed hereupon little to ceremony. "I've but a moment, to my regret, to give you, Mr. Bender, and if you've been unavoidably detained, as you great bustling people are so apt to be, it will perhaps still be soon enough for your comfort to hear from me that I've just given order to close our exhibition. From the present hour on, sir"—he put it with the firmness required to settle the futility of an appeal.

Mr. Bender's large surprise lost itself, however, promptly enough, in Mr. Bender's larger ease. "Why, do you really mean it, Lord Theign?—removing already from view a work that gives innocent gratification to thousands?"

"Well," said his lordship curtly, "if thousands have seen it I've done what I wanted, and if they've been gratified I'm content—and invite you to be."

Mr. Bender showed more keenness for this richer implication. "In other words it's I who may remove the picture?"

"Well—if you'll take it on my estimate."

"But what, Lord Theign, all this time," Mr. Bender almost pathetically pleaded, "is your estimate?"

The parting guest had another pause, which prolonged itself, after he had reached the door, in a deep solicitation of their hostess's conscious eyes. This brief passage apparently inspired his answer. "Lady Sandgate will tell you." The door closed behind him.

The charming woman smiled then at her other friend, whose comprehensive presence appeared now to demand of her some account of these strange proceedings. "He means that your own valuation is much too shockingly high."

"But how can I know how much unless I find out what he'll take?" The great collector's spirit had, in spite of its volume, clearly not reached its limit of expansion. "Is he crazily waiting for the thing to be proved not what Mr. Crimble claims?"

"No, he's waiting for nothing—since he holds that claim demolished by Pappendick's tremendous negative, which you wrote to tell him of."

Vast, undeveloped and suddenly grave, Mr. Bender's countenance showed like a barren tract under a black cloud. "I wrote to report, fair and square, on Pap-pendick, but to tell him I'd take the picture just the same, negative and all."

"Ah, but take it in that way not for what it is but for what it isn't."

"We know nothing about what it 'isn't,'" said Mr. Bender, "after all that has happened—we've only learned a little better every day what it is."

"You mean," his companion asked, "the biggest bone of artistic contention——?"

"Yes,"—he took it from her—"the biggest that has been thrown into the arena for quite a while. I guess I can do with it for that."

Lady Sandgate, on this, after a moment, renewed her personal advance; it was as if she had now made sure of the soundness of her main bridge. "Well, if it's the biggest bone I won't touch it; I'll leave it to be mauled by my betters. But since his lordship has asked me to name a price, dear Mr. Bender, I'll name one—and as you prefer big prices I'll try to make it suit you. Only it won't be for the portrait of a person nobody is agreed about. The whole world is agreed, you know, about my great-grandmother."

"Oh, shucks, Lady Sandgate!"—and her visitor turned from her with the hunch of overcharged shoulders.

But she apparently felt that she held him, or at least that even if such a conviction might be fatuous she must now put it to the touch. "You've been delivered into my hands—too charmingly; and you won't really pretend that you don't recognise that and in fact rather like it."

He faced about to her again as to a case of coolness unparalleled—though indeed with a quick lapse of real interest in the question of whether he had been artfully practised upon; an indifference to bad debts or peculation like that of some huge hotel or other business involving a margin for waste. He could afford, he could work waste too, clearly—and what was it, that term, you might have felt him ask, but a mean measure, anyway? quite as the "artful," opposed to his larger game, would be the hiding and pouncing of children at play. "Do I gather that those uncanny words of his were just meant to put me off?" he inquired. And then as she but boldly and smilingly shrugged, repudiating responsibility, "Look here, Lady Sandgate, ain't you honestly going to help me?" he pursued.