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, to ask your consent to my seeing Lady Grace a moment on a particular business, if she can kindly give me time.”

“You’ve known then of her being with me?”

“I’ve known of her coming to you straight on leaving Dedborough,” he explained; “of her wishing not to go to her sister’s, and of Lord Theign’s having proceeded, as they say, or being on the point of proceeding, to some foreign part.”

“And you’ve learnt it from having seen her—these three or four weeks?”

“I’ve met her—but just barely—two or three times: at a ‘private view’ at the opera, in the lobby, and that sort of thing. But she hasn’t told you?”

Lady Sandgate neither affirmed nor denied; she only turned on him her thick lustre. “I wanted to see how much you’d tell.” She waited even as for more, but this not coming she helped herself. “Once again at dinner?”

“Yes, but alas not near her!”

“Once then at a private view?—when, with the squash they usually are, you might have been very near her indeed!”

The young man, his hilarity quickened, took but a moment for the truth. “Yes—it was a squash!”

“And once,” his hostess pursued, “in the lobby of the opera?”

“After ‘Tristan’—yes; but with some awful grand people I didn’t know.”

She recognised; she estimated the grandeur. “Oh, the Pennimans are nobody! But now,” she asked, “you’ve come, you say, on ‘business’?”

“Very important, please—which accounts for the hour I’ve ventured and the appearance I present.”

“I don’t ask you too much to ‘account,’” Lady Sandgate kindly said; “but I can’t not wonder if she hasn’t told you what things have happened.”

He cast about. “She has had no chance to tell me anything—beyond the fact of her being here.”

“Without the reason?”

“‘The reason’?” he echoed.

She gave it up, going straighter. “She’s with me then as an old firm friend. Under my care and protection.”

“I see”—he took it, with more penetration than enthusiasm, as a hint in respect to himself. “She puts you on your guard.”

Lady Sandgate expressed it more graciously. “She puts me on my honour—or at least her father does.”

“As to her seeing me”

“As to my seeing at least—what may happen to her.”

“Because—you say—things have happened?”

His companion fairly sounded him. “You’ve only talked—when you’ve met—of ‘art’?”

“Well,” he smiled, “‘art is long’!”

“Then I hope it may see you through! But you should know first that Lord Theign is presently due—”

“Here, back already from abroad?”—he was all alert.

“He has not yet gone—he comes up this morning to start.”

“And stops here on his way?”

“To take the train de luxe this afternoon to his annual Salsomaggiore. But with so little time to spare,” she went on reassuringly, “that, to simplify—as he wired me an hour ago from Dedborough—he has given rendezvous here to Mr. Bender, who is particularly to wait for him.”

“And who may therefore arrive at any moment?”

She looked at her bracelet watch. “Scarcely before noon. So you’ll just have your chance—”

“Thank the powers then!”—Hugh grasped at it. “I shall have it best if you’ll be so good as to tell me first—well,” he faltered, “what it is that, to my great disquiet, you’ve further alluded to; what it is that has occurred.”

Lady Sandgate took her time, but her good-nature and other sentiments pronounced. “Haven’t you at least guessed that she has fallen under her father’s extreme reprobation?”

“Yes, so much as that—that she must have greatly annoyed him—I have been supposing. But isn’t it by her having asked me to act for her? I mean about the Mantovano—which I have done.”

Lady Sandgate wondered. “You’ve ‘acted’?”

“It’s what I’ve come to tell her at last—and I’m all impatience.”

“I see, I see”—she had caught a clue. “He hated that—yes; but you haven’t really made out,” she put to him, “the other effect of your hour at Dedborough?” She recognised, however, while she spoke, that his divination had failed, and she didn’t trouble him to confess it. “Directly you had gone she ‘turned down’ Lord John. Declined, I mean, the offer of his hand in marriage.”

Hugh was clearly as much mystified as anything else. “He proposed there—?”

“He had spoken, that day, before—before your talk with Lord Theign, who had every confidence in her accepting him. But you came, Mr. Crimble, you went; and when her suitor reappeared, just after you had gone, for his answer—”

“She wouldn’t have him?” Hugh asked with a precipitation of interest.

But Lady Sandgate could humour almost any curiosity. “She wouldn’t look at him.”

He bethought himself. “But had she said she would?”

“So her father indignantly considers.”

“That’s the ground of his indignation?”

“He had his reasons for counting on her, and it has determined a painful crisis.”

Hugh Crimble turned this over—feeling apparently for something he didn’t find. “I’m sorry to hear such things, but where’s the connection with me?”

“Ah, you know best yourself, and if you don’t see any—-!” In that case, Lady Sandgate’s motion implied, she washed her hands of it.

Hugh had for a moment the air of a young man treated to the sweet chance to guess a conundrum—which he gave up. “I really don’t see any, Lady Sandgate. But,” he a little inconsistently said, “I’m greatly obliged to you for telling me.”

“Don’t mention it!—though I think it is good of me,” she smiled, “on so short an acquaintance.” To which she added more gravely: “I leave you the situation—but I’m willing to let you know that I’m all on Grace’s side.”

“So am I, rather!—please let me frankly say.”

He clearly refreshed, he even almost charmed her. “It’s the very least you can say!—though I’m not sure whether you say it as the simplest or as the very subtlest of men. But in case you don’t know as I do how little the particular candidate I’ve named——”

“Had a right or a claim to succeed with her?” he broke in—all quick intelligence here at least. “No, I don’t perhaps know as well as you do—but I think I know as well as I just yet require.”

“There you are then! And if you did prevent,” his hostess maturely pursued, “what wouldn’t have been—well, good or nice, I’m quite on your side too.”

Our young man seemed to feel the shade of ambiguity, but he reached at a meaning. “You’re with me in my plea for our defending at any cost of effort or ingenuity—”

“The precious picture Lord Theign exposes?”—she took his presumed sense faster than he had taken hers. But she hung fire a moment with her reply to it. “Well, will you keep the secret of everything I’ve said or say?”

“To the death, to the stake, Lady Sandgate!”

“Then,” she momentously returned, “I only want, too, to make Bender impossible. If you ask me,” she pursued, “how I arrange that with my deep loyalty to Lord Theign——”

“I don’t ask you anything of the sort,” he interrupted—“I wouldn’t ask you for the world; and my own bright plan for achieving the coup you mention———”

“You’ll have time, at the most,” she said, consulting afresh her bracelet watch, “to explain to Lady Grace.” She reached an electric bell, which she touched—facing then her visitor again with an abrupt and slightly embarrassed change of tone. “You do think my great portrait splendid?”

He had strayed far from it and all too languidly came back. “Your Lawrence there? As I said, magnificent.”

But the butler had come in, interrupting, straight from the lobby; of whom she made her request. “Let her ladyship know—Mr. Crimble.”

Gotch looked hard at Hugh and the crumpled hat—almost as if having an option. But he resigned himself to repeating, with a distinctness that scarce fell short of the invidious, “Mr. Crimble,” and departed on his errand.

Lady Sandgate’s fair flush of diplomacy had meanwhile not faded. “Couldn’t you, with your immense cleverness and power, get the Government to do something?”

“About your picture?” Hugh betrayed on this head a graceless detachment. “You too then want to sell?”

Oh she righted herself. “Never to a private party!”

“Mr. Bender’s not after it?” he asked—though scarce lighting his reluctant interest with a forced smile.

“Most intensely after it. But never,” cried the proprietress, “to a bloated alien!”

“Then I applaud your patriotism. Only why not,” he asked, “carrying that magnanimity a little further, set us all an example as splendid as the object itself?”

“Give it you for nothing?” She threw up shocked hands. “Because I’m an aged female pauper and can’t make every sacrifice.”

Hugh pretended—none too convincingly—to think. “Will you let them have it very cheap?”

“Yes—for less than such a bribe as Bender’s.”

“Ah,” he said expressively, “that might be, and still——!”

“Well,” she had a flare of fond confidence. “I’ll find out what he’ll offer—if you’ll on your side do what you can—and then ask them a third less.” And she followed it up—as if suddenly conceiving him a prig. “See here, Mr. Crimble, I’ve been—and this very first time I—charming to you.”

“You have indeed,” he returned; “but you throw back on it a lurid light if it has all been for that!”

“It has been—well, to keep things as I want them; and if I’ve given you precious information mightn’t you on your side—”

“Estimate its value in cash?”—Hugh sharply took her up. “Ah, Lady Sandgate, I am in your debt, but if you really bargain for your precious information I’d rather we assume that I haven’t enjoyed it.”

She made him, however, in reply, a sign for silence; she had heard Lady Grace enter the other room from the back landing, and, reaching the nearer door, she disposed of the question with high gay bravery. “I won’t bargain with the Treasury!”—she had passed out by the time Lady Grace arrived.