The Outcry: -1911

Her companion then, during a moment's silence, might have been noting the emphasis of her assent. 'Have you known him long?'

'No—not long.'

'Nor seen him often?'

'Only once—till now.'

'Oh!' said Lord John with another pause. But he soon proceeded. 'Let us leave him then to cool! I haven't cycled twenty miles, but I've motored forty very much in the hope of this, Lady Grace— the chance of being able to assure you that I too care very much for what I care for.' To which he added on an easier note, as to carry off a slight awkwardness while she only waited: 'You certainly mustn't let yourself— between us all—be worked to death.'

'Oh, such days as this—I' She made light enough of her burden.

'They don't come often to me at least, Lady Grace! I hadn't grasped in advance the scale of your fete,' he went on; 'but since I've the great luck to find you alone—!' He paused for breath, however, before the full sequence.

She helped him out as through common kindness, but it was a trifle colourless. 'Alone or in company, Lord John, I'm always very glad to see you.'

'Then that assurance helps me to wonder if you don't perhaps gently guess what it is I want to say.' This time indeed she left him to his wonder, so that he had to support himself. 'I've tried, all considerately—these three months—to let you see for yourself how I feel. I feel very strongly, Lady Grace; so that at last'—and his impatient sincerity took after another instant the jump—'well, I regularly worship you. You're my absolute ideal. I think of you the whole time.'

She measured out consideration as if it had been a yard of pretty ribbon. 'Are you sure you know me enough?'

'I think I know a perfect woman when I see one!' Nothing now at least could have been more prompt, and while a decent pity for such a mistake showed in her smile he followed it up. 'Isn't what you rather mean that you haven't cared sufficiently to know me? If so, that can be little by little mended, Lady Grace.' He was in fact altogether gallant about it. 'I'm aware of the limits of what I have to show or to offer, but I defy you to find a limit to my possible devotion.'

She deferred to that, but taking it in a lower key. 'I believe you'd be very good to me.'

'Well, isn't that something to start with?'—he fairly pounced on it. 'I'll do any blest thing in life you like, I'll accept any condition you impose, if you'll only tell me you see your way.'

'Shouldn't I have a little more first to see yours?' she asked. 'When you say you'll do anything in life I like, isn't there anything you yourself want strongly enough to do?'

He cast a stare about on the suggestions of the scene. 'Anything that will make money, you mean?'

'Make money or make reputation—or even just make the time pass.'

'Oh, what I have to look to in the way of a career?' If that was her meaning he could show after an instant that he didn't fear it. 'Well, your father, dear delightful man, has been so good as to give me to understand that he backs me for a decent deserving creature; and I've noticed, as you doubtless yourself have, that when Lord Theign backs a fellow——!'

He left the obvious moral for her to take up—which she did, but all interrogatively. 'The fellow at once comes in for something awfully good?'

'I don't in the least mind your laughing at me,' Lord John returned, 'for when I put him the question of the lift he'd give me by speaking to you first he bade me simply remember the complete personal liberty in which he leaves you, and yet which doesn't come—take my word!' said the young man sagely—'from his being at all indifferent.'

'No,' she answered—'father isn't indifferent. But father's 'great''

'Great indeed!'—her friend took it as with full comprehension. This appeared not to prevent, however, a second and more anxious thought. 'Too great for you?'

'Well, he makes me feel—even as his daughter—my extreme comparative smallness.'

It was easy, Lord John indicated, to see what she meant 'He's a grand seigneur, and a serious one—that's what he is: the very type and model of it, down to the ground. So you can imagine,' the young man said, 'what he makes me feel—most of all when he's so awfully good-natured to me. His being as 'great' as you say and yet backing me—such as I am!—doesn't that strike you as a good note for me, the best you could possibly require? For he really would like what I propose to you.'

She might have been noting, while she thought, that he had risen to ingenuity, to fineness, on the wings of his argument; under the effect of which her reply had the air of a concession. 'Yes—he would like it.'

'Then he has spoken to you?' her suitor eagerly asked.

'He hasn't needed—he has ways of letting one know.'

'Yes, yes, he has ways; all his own—like everything else he has. He's wonderful.'

She fully agreed. 'He's wonderful.'

The tone of it appeared somehow to shorten at once for Lord John the rest of his approach to a conclusion. 'So you do see your way?'

'Ah—!' she said with a quick sad shrinkage.

'I mean,' her visitor hastened to explain, 'if he does put it to you as the very best idea he has for you. When he does that—as I believe him ready to do—will you really and fairly listen to him? I'm certain, honestly, that when you know me better—!' His confidence in short donned a bravery.

'I've been feeling this quarter of an hour,' the girl returned, 'that I do know you better.'