The Outcry: -1911

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