intensifying the emphasis.
He had his effect, and Lord Theign's answer, addressed to Lady Grace, made indifference very comprehensive. 'You may do what ever you dreadfully like!'
At this then the girl, with an air that seemed to present her choice as absolutely taken, reached the door which Hugh had come across to open for her.
Here she paused as for another, a last look at her father, and her expression seemed to say to him unaidedly that, much as she would have preferred to proceed to her act without this gross disorder, she could yet find inspiration too in the very difficulty and the old faiths themselves that he left her to struggle with. All this made for depth and beauty in her serious young face—as it had indeed a force that, not indistinguishably, after an instant, his lordship lost any wish for longer exposure to. His shift of his attitude before she went out was fairly an evasion; if the extent of the levity of one of his daughter's made him afraid, what might have been his present strange sense but a fear of the other from the extent of her gravity? Lady Grace passes from us at any rate in her laced and pearled and plumed slimness and her pale concentration—leaving her friend a moment, however, with his hand on the door.
'You thanked me just now for Bardi's opinion after all,' Hugh said with a smile; 'and it seems to me that—after all as well—I've grounds for thanking you!' On which he left his benefactor alone.
'Tit for tat!' There broke from Lord Theign, in his solitude, with the young man out of earshot, that vague ironic comment; which only served his turn, none the less, till, bethinking himself, he had gone back to the piece of furniture used for his late scribble and come away from it again the next minute delicately holding a fair slip that we naturally recognise as Mr. Bender's forgotten cheque. This apparently surprising value he now studied at his ease and to the point of its even drawing from him an articulate 'What in damnation—?' His speculation dropped before the return of his hostess, whose approach through the other room fell upon his ear and whom he awaited after a quick thrust of the cheque into his waistcoat.
Lady Sandgate appeared now in due—that is in the most happily adjusted—splendour; she had changed her dress for something smarter and more appropriate to the entertainment of Princes, 'Tea will be downstairs,' she said. 'But you're alone?'
'I've just parted,' her friend replied, 'with Grace and Mr. Crimble.'
''Parted' with them?'—the ambiguity struck her.
'Well, they've gone out together to flaunt their monstrous connection!'
'You speak,' she laughed, 'as if it were too gross—I They're surely coming back?'
'Back to you, if you like—but not to me.'
'Ah, what are you and I,' she tenderly argued, 'but one and the same quantity? And though you may not as yet absolutely rejoice in—well, whatever they're doing,' she cheerfully added, 'you'll get beautifully used to it.'
'That's just what I'm afraid of—what such horrid matters make of one!'
'At the worst then, you see'—she maintained her optimism—'the recipient of royal attentions!'
'Oh,' said her companion, whom his honour seemed to leave comparatively cold, 'it's simply as if the gracious Personage were coming to condole!'
Impatient of the lapse of time, in any case, she assured herself again of the hour. 'Well, if he only does come!'
'John—the wretch!' Lord Theign returned—'will take care of that: he has nailed him and will bring him.'
'What was it then,' his friend found occasion in the particular tone of this reference to demand, 'what was it that, when you sent him off, John spoke of you in Bond Street as specifically intending?'
Oh he saw it now all lucidly—if not rather luridly—and thereby the more tragically. 'He described me in his nasty rage as consistently—well, heroic!'
'His rage'—she pieced it sympathetically out—'at your destroying his cherished credit with Bender?'
Lord Theign was more and more possessed of this view of the manner of it. 'I had come between him and some profit that he doesn't confess to, but that made him viciously and vindictively serve me up there, as he caught the chance, to the Prince—and the People!'
She cast about, in her intimate interest, as for some closer conception of it. 'By saying that you had remarked here that you offered the People the picture—?'
'As a sacrifice—yes!—to morbid, though respectable scruples.' To which he sharply added, as if struck with her easy grasp of the scene: 'But I hope you've nothing to call a memory for any such extravagance?'
Lady Sandgate waited—then boldly took her line. 'None whatever! You had reacted against Bender—but you hadn't gone so far as
He had it now all vividly before him. 'I had reacted—like a gentleman; but it didn't thereby follow that I acted —or spoke—like a demagogue; and my mind's a complete blank on the subject of my having done so.'
'So that there only flushes through your conscience,' she suggested, 'the fact that he has forced your hand?'
Fevered with the sore sense of it his lordship wiped his brow. 'He has played me, for spite, his damned impertinent trick!'
She found but after a minute—for it wasn't easy—the right word, or the least wrong, for the situation. 'Well, even if he did so diabolically commit you, you still don't want—do you?—to back out?'
Resenting the suggestion, which restored all his nobler form, Lord Theign fairly drew himself up. 'When did I ever in all my life back out?'
'Never, never in all your life of course!'—she dashed a bucketful at the flare. 'And the picture after all ——!'
'The picture after all'—he took her up in cold grim gallant despair—'has just been pronounced definitely priceless.' And then to meet her gaping ignorance: 'By Mr. Crimble's latest and apparently greatest adviser, who
