Left with her friend, Lady Grace had a prompt question. “Lord John warned me he was ‘funny’—but you already know him?”

There might have been a sense of embarrassment in the way in which, as to gain time, Lady Sandgate pointed, instead of answering, to the small picture pronounced upon by Mr. Bender. “He thinks your little Cuyp a fraud.”

“That one?” Lady Grace could but stare. “The wretch!” However, she made, without alarm, no more of it; she returned to her previous question. “You’ve met him before?”

“Just a little—in town. Being ‘after pictures’” Lady Sandgate explained, “he has been after my great-grandmother.”

“She,” said Lady Grace with amusement, “must have found him funny! But he can clearly take care of himself, while Kitty takes care of Lord John, and while you, if you’ll be so good, go back to support father—in the hour of his triumph: which he wants you so much to witness that he complains of your desertion and goes so far as to speak of you as sneaking away.”

Lady Sandgate, with a slight flush, turned it over. “I delight in his triumph, and whatever I do is at least above board; but if it’s a question of support, aren’t you yourself failing him quite as much?”

This had, however, no effect on the girl’s confidence. “Ah, my dear, I’m not at all the same thing, and as I’m the person in the world he least misses—” Well, such a fact spoke for itself.

“You’ve been free to return and wait for Lord John?”—that was the sense in which the elder woman appeared to prefer to understand it as speaking.

The tone of it, none the less, led her companion immediately, though very quietly, to correct her. “I’ve not come back to wait for Lord John.”

“Then he hasn’t told you—if you’ve talked—with what idea he has come?”

Lady Grace had for a further correction the same shade of detachment. “Kitty has told me—what it suits her to pretend to suppose.”

“And Kitty’s pretensions and suppositions always go with what happens—at the moment, among all her wonderful happenings—to suit her?”

Lady Grace let that question answer itself—she took the case up further on. “What I can’t make out is why this should so suit her!”

“And what I can’t!” said Lady Sandgate without gross honesty and turning away after having watched the girl a moment. She nevertheless presently faced her again to follow this speculation up. “Do you like him enough to risk the chance of Kitty’s being for once right?”

Lady Grace gave it a thought—with which she moved away. “I don’t know how much I like him!”

“Nor how little!” cried her friend, who evidently found amusement in the tone of it. “And you’re not disposed to take the time to find out? He’s at least better than the others.”

“The ‘others’?”—Lady Grace was blank for them.

“The others of his set.”

“Oh, his set! That wouldn’t be difficult—by what I imagine of some of them. But he means well enough,” the girl added; “he’s very charming and does me great honour.”

It determined in her companion, about to leave her, another brief arrest. “Then may I tell your father?”

This in turn brought about in Lady Grace an immediate drop of the subject. “Tell my father, please, that I’m expecting Mr. Crimble; of whom I’ve spoken to him even if he doesn’t remember, and who bicycles this afternoon ten miles over from where he’s staying—with some people we don’t know—to look at the pictures, about which he’s awfully keen.”

Lady Sandgate took it in. “Ah, like Mr. Bender?”

“No, not at all, I think, like Mr. Bender.”

This appeared to move in the elder woman some deeper thought “May I ask then—if one’s to meet him—who he is?”

“Oh, father knows—or ought to—that I sat next him, in London, a month ago, at dinner, and that he then told me he was working, tooth and nail, at what he called the wonderful modern science of Connoisseurship—which is upsetting, as perhaps you’re not aware, all the old-fashioned canons of art-criticism, everything we’ve stupidly thought right and held dear; that he was to spend Easter in these parts, and that he should like greatly to be allowed some day to come over and make acquaintance with our things. I told him,” Lady Grace wound up, “that nothing would be easier; a note from him arrived before dinner——”

Lady Sandgate jumped the rest “And it’s for him you’ve come in.”

“It’s for him I’ve come in,” the girl assented with serenity.

“Very good—though he sounds most detrimental! But will you first just tell me this—whether when you sent in ten minutes ago for Lord John to come out to you it was wholly of your own movement?” And she followed it up as her young friend appeared to hesitate. “Was it because you knew why he had arrived?”

The young friend hesitated still. “‘Why ‘?”

“So particularly to speak to you.”

“Since he was expected and mightn’t know where I was,” Lady Grace said after an instant, “I wanted naturally to be civil to him.”

“And had he time there to tell you,” Lady Sand-gate asked, “how very civil he wants to be to you?”

“No, only to tell me that his friend—who’s off there—was coming; for Kitty at once appropriated him and was still in possession when I came away.” Then, as deciding at last on perfect frankness, Lady Grace went on: “If you want to know, I sent for news of him because Kitty insisted on my doing so; saying, so very oddly and quite in her own way, that she herself didn’t wish to ‘appear in it.’ She had done nothing but say to me for an hour, rather worryingly, what you’ve just said—that it’s me he’s what, like Mr. Bender, she calls ‘after’; but as soon as he appeared she pounced on him, and I left him—I assure you quite resignedly—in her hands.”

“She wants”—it was easy for Lady Sandgate to remark—“to talk of you to him.”

“I don’t know what she wants,” the girl replied as with rather a tired patience; “Kitty wants so many things at once. She always wants money, in quantities, to begin with—and all to throw so horribly away; so that whenever I see her ‘in’ so very deep with any one I always imagine her appealing for some new tip as to how it’s to be come by.”

“Kitty’s an abyss, I grant you, and with my disinterested devotion to your father—in requital of all his kindness to me since Lord Sandgate’s death and since your mother’s—I can never be too grateful to you, my dear, for your being so different a creature. But what is she going to gain financially,” Lady Sand-gate pursued with a strong emphasis on her adverb, “by working up our friend’s confidence in your listening to him—if you are to listen?”

“I haven’t in the least engaged to listen,” said Lady Grace—“it will depend on the music he makes!” But she added with light cynicism: “Perhaps she’s to gain a commission!”

“On his fairly getting you?” And then as the girl assented by silence: “Is he in a position to pay her one?” Lady Sandgate asked.

“I dare say the Duchess is!”

“But do you see the Duchess producing money—with all that Kitty, as we’re not ignorant, owes her? Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds!”—Lady Sandgate piled them up.

Her young friend’s gesture checked it. “Ah, don’t tell me how many—it’s too sad and too ugly and too wrong!” To which, however, Lady Grace added: “But perhaps that will be just her way!” And then as her companion seemed for the moment not quite to follow: “By letting Kitty off her debt.”

“You mean that Kitty goes free if Lord John wins your promise?”

“Kitty goes free.”

“She has her creditor’s release?”

“For every shilling.”

“And if he only fails?”

“Why then of course,” said now quite lucid Lady Grace, “she throws herself more than ever on poor father.”

“Poor father indeed!”—Lady Sandgate richly sighed it

It appeared even to create in the younger woman a sense of excess. “Yes—but he after all and in spite of everything adores her.”

“To the point, you mean”—for Lady Sandgate could clearly but wonder—“of really sacrificing you?”

The weight of Lady Grace’s charming deep eyes on her face made her pause while, at some length, she gave back this look and the interchange determined in the girl a grave appeal. “You think I should be sacrificed if I married him?”

Lady Sandgate replied, though with an equal emphasis, indirectly. “Could you marry him?”

Lady Grace waited a moment “Do you mean for Kitty?”

“For himself even—if they should convince you, among them, that he cares for you.”

Lady Grace had another delay. “Well, he’s his awful mother’s son.”

“Yes—but you wouldn’t marry his mother.”

“No—but I should only be the more uncomfortably and intimately conscious of her.”

“Even when,” Lady Sandgate optimistically put it, “she so markedly likes you?”

This determined in the girl a fine impatience. “She doesn’t ‘like’ me, she only wants me—which is a very different thing; wants me for my father’s so particularly beautiful position, and my mother’s so supremely great people, and for everything we have been and have done, and still are and still have: except of course poor not-at-all-model Kitty.”

To this luminous account of the matter Lady Sand-gate turned as to a genial sun-burst. “I see indeed—for the general immaculate connection.”

The words had no note of irony, but Lady Grace, in her great seriousness, glanced with deprecation at the possibility. “Well, we haven’t had false notes. We’ve scarcely even had bad moments.”

“Yes, you’ve been beatific!”—Lady Sandgate enviously, quite ruefully, felt it. But any further treatment of the question was checked by the re-entrance of the footman—a demonstration explained by the concomitant appearance of a young man in eyeglasses and with the ends of his trousers clipped together as for cycling. “This must be your friend,” she had only time to say to the daughter of the house; with which, alert and reminded of how she was awaited elsewhere, she retreated before her companion’s visitor, who had come in with his guide from the vestibule. She passed away to the terrace and the gardens, Mr. Hugh Crimble’s announced name ringing in her ears—to some effect that we are as yet not qualified to discern.