The Outcry: -1911

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,