The Outcry: -1911

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