The Outcry: -1911

'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.'