Lord Theign, when he had gone, revolved—it might have been nervously—about the place a little, but soon broke ground. “He’ll have told you, I understand, that I’ve promised to speak to you for him. But I understand also that he has found something to say for himself.”

“Yes, we talked—a while since,” the girl said. “At least he did.”

“Then if you listened I hope you listened with a good grace.”

“Oh, he speaks very well—and I’ve never disliked him.”

It pulled her father up. “Is that all—when I think so much of him?”

She seemed to say that she had, to her own mind, been liberal and gone far; but she waited a little. “Do you think very, very much?”

“Surely I’ve made my good opinion clear to you!”

Again she had a pause. “Oh yes, I’ve seen you like him and believe in him—and I’ve found him pleasant and clever.”

“He has never had,” Lord Theign more or less ingeniously explained, “what I call a real show.” But the character under discussion could after all be summed up without searching analysis. “I consider nevertheless that there’s plenty in him.”

It was a moderate claim, to which Lady Grace might assent. “He strikes me as naturally quick and—well, nice. But I agree with you than he hasn’t had a chance.”

“Then if you can see your way by sympathy and confidence to help him to one I dare say you’ll find your reward.”

For a third time she considered, as if a certain curtness in her companion’s manner rather hindered, in such a question, than helped. Didn’t he simplify too much, you would have felt her ask, and wasn’t his visible wish for brevity of debate a sign of his uncomfortable and indeed rather irritated sense of his not making a figure in it? “Do you desire it very particularly?” was, however, all she at last brought out.

“I should like it exceedingly—if you act from conviction. Then of course only; but of one thing I’m myself convinced—of what he thinks of yourself and feels for you.”

“Then would you mind my waiting a little?” she asked. “I mean to be absolutely sure of myself.” After which, on his delaying to agree, she added frankly, as to help her case: “Upon my word, father, I should like to do what would please you.”

But it determined in him a sharper impatience. “Ah, what would please me! Don’t put it off on ‘me’! Judge absolutely for yourself”—he slightly took himself up—“in the light of my having consented to do for him what I always hate to do: deviate from my normal practice of never intermeddling. If I’ve deviated now you can judge. But to do so all round, of course, take—in reason!—your time.”

“May I ask then,” she said, “for still a little more?”

He looked for this, verily, as if it was not in reason. “You know,” he then returned, “what he’ll feel that a sign of.”

“Well, I’ll tell him what I mean.”

“Then I’ll send him to you.”

He glanced at his watch and was going, but after a “Thanks, father,” she had stopped him. “There’s one thing more.” An embarrassment showed in her manner, but at the cost of some effect of earnest abruptness she surmounted it. “What does your American—Mr. Bender—want?”

Lord Theign plainly felt the challenge. “‘My’ American? He’s none of mine!”

“Well then Lord John’s.”

“He’s none of his either—more, I mean, than any one else’s. He’s every one’s American, literally—to all appearance; and I’ve not to tell you, surely, with the freedom of your own visitors, how people stalk in and out here.”

“No, father—certainly,” she said. “You’re splendidly generous.”

His eyes seemed rather sharply to ask her then how he could improve on that; but he added as if it were enough: “What the man must by this time want more than anything else is his car.”

“Not then anything of ours?” she still insisted.

“Of ‘ours’?” he echoed with a frown. “Are you afraid he has an eye to something of yours?”

“Why, if we’ve a new treasure—which we certainly have if we possess a Mantovano—haven’t we all, even I, an immense interest in it?” And before he could answer, “Is that exposed?” she asked.

Lord Theign, a little unready, cast about at his storied halls; any illusion to the “exposure” of the objects they so solidly sheltered was obviously unpleasant to him. But then it was as if he found at a stroke both his own reassurance and his daughter’s. “How can there be a question of it when he only wants Sir Joshuas?”

“He wants ours?” the girl gasped.

“At absolutely any price.”

“But you’re not,” she cried, “discussing it?”

He hesitated as between chiding and contenting her—then he handsomely chose. “My dear child, for what do you take me?” With which he impatiently started, through the long and stately perspective, for the saloon.

She sank into a chair when he had gone; she sat there some moments in a visible tension of thought, her hands clasped in her lap and her dropped eyes fixed and unperceiving; but she sprang up as Hugh Crimble, in search of her, again stood before her. He presented himself as with winged sandals.

“What luck to find you! I must take my spin back.”

“You’ve seen everything as you wished?”

“Oh,” he smiled, “I’ve seen wonders.”

She showed her pleasure. “Yes, we’ve got some things.”

“So Mr. Bender says!” he laughed. “You’ve got five or six—”

“Only five or six?” she cried in bright alarm.

“‘Only’?” he continued to laugh. “Why, that’s enormous, five or six things of the first importance! But I think I ought to mention to you,” he added, “a most barefaced ‘Rubens’ there in the library.”

“It isn’t a Rubens?”

“No more than I’m a Ruskin.”

“Then you’ll brand us—expose us for it?”

“No, I’ll let you off—I’ll be quiet if you’re good, if you go straight. I’ll only hold it in terrorem. One can’t be sure in these dreadful days—that’s always to remember; so that if you’re not good I’ll come down on you with it. But to balance against that threat,” he went on, “I’ve made the very grandest find. At least I believe I have!”

She was all there for this news. “Of the Manto-vano—hidden in the other thing?”

Hugh wondered—almost as if she had been before him. “You don’t mean to say you’ve had the idea of that?”

“No, but my father has told me.”

“And is your father,” he eagerly asked, “really gratified?”

With her conscious eyes on him—her eyes could clearly be very conscious about her father—she considered a moment. “He always prefers old associations and appearances to new; but I’m sure he’ll resign himself if you see your way to a certainty.”

“Well, it will be a question of the weight of expert opinion that I shall invoke. But I’m not afraid,” he resolutely said, “and I shall make the thing, from its splendid rarity, the crown and flower of your glory.”

Her serious face shone at him with a charmed gratitude. “It’s awfully beautiful then your having come to us so. It’s awfully beautiful your having brought us this way, in a flash—as dropping out of a chariot of fire—more light and what you apparently feel with myself as more honour.”

“Ah, the beauty’s in your having yourself done it!” he returned. He gave way to the positive joy of it. “If I’ve brought the ‘light’ and the rest—that’s to say the very useful information—who in the world was it brought me?”

She had a gesture of protest “You’d have come in some other way.”

“I’m not so sure! I’m beastly shy—little as I may seem to show it: save in great causes, when I’m horridly bold and hideously offensive. Now at any rate I only know what has been.” She turned off for it, moving away from him as with a sense of mingled things that made for unrest; and he had the next moment grown graver under the impression. “But does anything in it all,” he asked, “trouble you?”

She faced about across the wider space, and there was a different note in what she brought out. “I don’t know what forces me so to tell you things.”

“‘Tell’ me?” he stared. “Why, you’ve told me nothing more monstrous than that I’ve been welcome!”

“Well, however that may be, what did you mean just now by the chance of our not ‘going straight’? When you said you’d expose our bad—or is it our false?—Rubens in the event of a certain danger.”

“Oh, in the event of your ever being bribed”—he laughed again as with relief. And then as her face seemed to challenge the word: “Why, to let anything—of your best!—ever leave Dedborough. By which I mean really of course leave the country.” She turned again on this, and something in her air made him wonder. “I hope you don’t feel there is such a danger? I understood from you half an hour ago that it was unthinkable.”

“Well, it was, to me, half an hour ago,” she said as she came nearer. “But if it has since come up?”

“‘If’ it has! But has it? In the form of that monster? What Mr. Bender wants is the great Duchess,” he recalled.

“And my father won’t sell her? No, he won’t sell the great Duchess—there I feel safe. But he greatly needs a certain sum of money—or he thinks he does—and I’ve just had a talk with him.”

“In which he has told you that?”

“He has told me nothing,” Lady Grace said—“or else told me quite other things. But the more I think of them the more it comes to me that he feels urged or tempted—”

“To despoil and denude these walls?” Hugh broke in, looking about in his sharper apprehension.

“Yes, to satisfy, to save my sister. Now do you think our state so ideal?” she asked—but without elation for her hint of triumph.

He had no answer for this save “Ah, but you terribly interest me. May I ask what’s the matter with your sister?”

Oh, she wanted to go on straight now! “The matter is—in the first place—that she’s too dazzlingly, dreadfully beautiful.”

“More beautiful than you?” his sincerity easily risked.

“Millions of times.” Sad, almost sombre, she hadn’t a shade of coquetry. “Kitty has debts—great heaped-up gaming debts.”

“But to such amounts?”

“Incredible amounts it appears. And mountains of others too. She throws herself all on our father.”

“And he has to pay them? There’s no one else?” Hugh asked.

She waited as if he might answer himself, and then as he apparently didn’t, “He’s only afraid there may be some else—that’s how she makes him do it,” she said. And “Now do you think,” she pursued, “that I don’t tell you things?”

He turned them over in his young perception and pity, the things she told him. “Oh, oh, oh!” And then, in the great place, while as, just spent by the effort of her disclosure, she moved from him again, he took them all in. “That’s the situation that, as you say, may force his hand.”

“It absolutely, I feel, does force it.” And the renewal of her appeal brought her round. “Isn’t it too lovely?”

His frank disgust answered. “It’s too damnable!”

“And it’s you,” she quite terribly smiled, “who—by the ‘irony of fate’!—have given him help.”

He smote his head in the light of it. “By the Mantovano?”

“By the possible Mantovano—as a substitute for the impossible Sir Joshua. You’ve made him aware of a value.”

“Ah, but the value’s to be fixed!”

“Then Mr. Bender will fix it!”

“Oh, but—as he himself would say—I’ll fix Mr. Bender!” Hugh declared. “And he won’t buy a pig in a poke.”

This cleared the air while they looked at each other; yet she had already asked: “What in the world can you do, and how in the world can you do it?”

Well, he was too excited for decision. “I don’t quite see now, but give me time.” And he took out his watch as already to measure it. “Oughtn’t I before I go to say a word to Lord Theign?”

“Is it your idea to become a lion in his path?”

“Well, say a cub—as that’s what I’m afraid he’ll call me! But I think I should speak to him.”

She drew a conclusion momentarily dark. “He’ll have to learn in that case that I’ve told you of my fear.”

“And is there any good reason why he shouldn’t?”

She kept her eyes on him and the darkness seemed to clear. “No!” she at last replied, and, having gone to touch an electric bell, was with him again. “But I think I’m rather sorry for you.”

“Does that represent a reason why I should be so for you?”

For a little she said nothing; but after that: “None whatever!”

“Then is the sister of whom you speak Lady Imber?”

Lady Grace, at this, raised her hand in caution: the butler had arrived, with due gravity, in answer to her ring; to whom she made known her desire. “Please say to his lordship—in the saloon or wherever—that Mr. Crimble must go.” When Banks had departed, however, accepting the responsibility of this mission, she answered her friend’s question. “The sister of whom I speak is Lady Imber.”

“She loses then so heavily at bridge?”

“She loses more than she wins.”

Hugh gazed as with interest at these oddities of the great. “And yet she still plays?”

“What else, in her set, should she do?”

This he was quite unable to say; but he could after a moment’s exhibition of the extent to which he was out of it put a question instead. “So you’re not in her set?”

“I’m not in her set.”

“Then decidedly,” he said, “I don’t want to save her. I only want—”

He was going on, but she broke in: “I know what you want!”

He kept his eyes on her till he had made sure—and this deep exchange between them had a beauty. “So you’re now with me?”

“I’m now with you!”

“Then,” said Hugh, “shake hands on it”

He offered her his hand, she took it, and their grasp became, as you would have seen in their fine young faces, a pledge in which they stood a minute locked. Lord Theign came upon them from the saloon in the midst of the process; on which they separated as with an air of its having consisted but of Hugh’s leave-taking. With some such form of mere civility, at any rate, he appeared, by the manner in which he addressed himself to Hugh, to have supposed them occupied.

“I’m sorry my daughter can’t keep you; but I must at least thank you for your interesting view of my picture.”

Hugh indulged in a brief and mute, though very grave, acknowledgment of this expression; presently speaking, however, as on a resolve taken with a sense of possibly awkward consequences: “May I—before you’re sure of your indebtedness—put you rather a straight question, Lord Theign?” It sounded doubtless, and of a sudden, a little portentous—as was in fact testified to by his lordship’s quick stiff stare, full of wonder at so free a note. But Hugh had the courage of his undertaking. “If I contribute in ny modest degree to establishing the true authorship of the work you speak of, may I have from you an assurance that my success isn’t to serve as a basis for any peril—or possibility—of its leaving the country?”

Lord Theign was visibly astonished, but had also, independently of this, turned a shade pale. “You ask of me an ‘assurance’?”

Hugh had now, with his firmness and his strained smile, quite the look of having counted the cost of his step. “I’m afraid I must, you see.”

It pressed at once in his host the spring of a very grand manner. “And pray by what right here do you do anything of the sort?”

“By the right of a person from whom you, on your side, are accepting a service.”

Hugh had clearly determined in his opponent a rise of what is called spirit. “A service that you half an hour ago thrust on me, sir—and with which you may take it from me that I’m already quite prepared to dispense.”

“I’m sorry to appear indiscreet,” our young man returned; “I’m sorry to have upset you in any way. But I can’t overcome my anxiety—”

Lord Theign took the words from his lips. “And you therefore invite me—at the end of half an hour in this house!—to account to you for my personal intentions and my private affairs and make over my freedom to your hands?”

Hugh stood there with his eyes on the black and white pavement that stretched about him—the great loz-enged marble floor that might have figured that ground of his own vision which he had made up his mind to “stand.” “I can only see the matter as I see it, and I should be ashamed not to have seized any chance to appeal to you.” Whatever difficulty he had had shyly to face didn’t exist for him now. “I entreat you to think again, to think well, before you deprive us of such a source of just envy.”

“And you regard your entreaty as helped,” Lord Theign asked, “by the beautiful threat you are so good as to attach to it?” Then as his monitor, arrested, exchanged a searching look with Lady Grace, who, showing in her face all the pain of the business, stood off at the distance to which a woman instinctively retreats when a scene turns to violence as precipitately as this one appeared to strike her as having turned: “I ask you that not less than I should like to know whom you speak of as ‘deprived’ of property that happens—for reasons that I don’t suppose you also quarrel with!—to be mine.”

“Well, I know nothing about threats, Lord Theign,” Hugh said, “but I speak of all of us—of all the people of England; who would deeply deplore such an act of alienation, and whom, for the interest they bear you, I beseech you mercifully to consider.”

“The interest they bear me?”—the master of Dedborough fairly bristled with wonder. “Pray how the devil do they show it?”

“I think they show it in all sorts of ways”—and Hugh’s critical smile, at almost any moment hovering, played over the question in a manner seeming to convey that he meant many things.

“Understand then, please,” said Lord Theign with every inch of his authority, “that they’ll show it best by minding their own business while I very particularly mind mine.”

“You simply do, in other words,” Hugh explicitly concluded, “what happens to be convenient to you.”

“In very distinct preference to what happens to be convenient to you! So that I need no longer detain you,” Lord Theign added with the last dryness and as if to wind up their brief and thankless connection.

The young man took his dismissal, being able to do no less, while, unsatisfied and unhappy, he looked about mechanically for the cycling-cap he had laid down somewhere in the hall on his arrival. “I apologise, my lord, if I seem to you to have ill repaid your hospitality. But,” he went on with his uncommended cheer, “my interest in your picture remains.”

Lady Grace, who had stopped and strayed and stopped again as a mere watchful witness, drew nearer hereupon, breaking her silence for the first time. “And please let me say, father, that mine also grows and grows.”

It was obvious that this parent, surprised and disconcerted by her tone, judged her contribution superfluous. “I’m happy to hear it, Grace—but yours is another affair.”

“I think on the contrary that it’s quite the same one,” she returned—“since it’s on my hint to him that Mr. Crimble has said to you what he has.” The resolution she had gathered while she awaited her chance sat in her charming eyes, which met, as she spoke, the straighter paternal glare. “I let him know that I supposed you to think of profiting by the importance of Mr. Bender’s visit.”

“Then you might have spared, my dear, your—I suppose and hope well-meant—interpretation of my mind.” Lord Theign showed himself at this point master of the beautiful art of righting himself as without having been in the wrong. “Mr. Bender’s visit will terminate—as soon as he has released Lord John—without my having profited in the smallest particular.”

Hugh meanwhile evidently but wanted to speak for his friend. “It was Lady Grace’s anxious inference, she will doubtless let me say for her, that my idea about the Moretto would add to your power—well,” he pushed on not without awkwardness, “of ‘realising’ advantageously on such a prospective rise.”

Lord Theign glanced at him as for positively the last time, but spoke to Lady Grace. “Understand then, please, that, as I detach myself from any association with this gentleman’s ideas—whether about the Moretto or about anything else—his further application of them ceases from this moment to concern us.”

The girl’s rejoinder was to address herself directly to Hugh, across their companion. “Will you make your inquiry for me then?”

The light again kindled in him. “With all the pleasure in life!” He had found his cap and, taking them together, bowed to the two, for departure, with high emphasis of form. Then he marched off in the direction from which he had entered.

Lord Theign scarce waited for his disappearance to turn in wrath to Lady Grace. “I denounce the indecency, wretched child, of your public defiance of me!”

They were separated by a wide interval now, and though at her distance she met his reproof so unshrinkingly as perhaps to justify the terms into which it had broken, she became aware of a reason for his not following it up. She pronounced in quick warning “Lord John!”—for their friend, released from among the pictures, was rejoining them, was already there.

He spoke straight to his host on coming into sight. “Bender’s at last off, but”—he indicated the direction of the garden front—“you may still find him, out yonder, prolonging the agony with Lady Sand-gate.”

Lord Theign remained a moment, and the heat of his resentment remained. He looked with a divided discretion, the pain of his indecision, from his daughter’s suitor and his approved candidate to that contumacious young woman and back again; then choosing his course in silence he had a gesture of almost desperate indifference and passed quickly out by the door to the terrace.

It had left Lord John gaping. “What on earth’s the matter with your father?”

“What on earth indeed?” Lady Grace unaidingly asked. “Is he discussing with that awful man?”

“Old Bender? Do you think him so awful?” Lord John showed surprise—which might indeed have passed for harmless amusement; but he shook everything off in view of a nearer interest. He quite waved old Bender away. “My dear girl, what do we care—?”

“I care immensely, I assure you,” she interrupted, “and I ask of you, please, to tell me!”

Her perversity, coming straight and which he had so little expected, threw him back so that he looked at her with sombre eyes. “Ah, it’s not for such a matter I’m here, Lady Grace—I’m here with that fond question of my own.” And then as she turned away, leaving him with a vehement motion of protest: “I’ve come for your kind answer—the answer your father instructed me to count on.”

“I’ve no kind answer to give you!”—she raised forbidding hands. “I entreat you to leave me alone.”

There was so high a spirit and so strong a force in it that he stared as if stricken by violence. “In God’s name then what has happened—when you almost gave me your word?”

“What has happened is that I’ve found it impossible to listen to you.” And she moved as if fleeing she scarce knew whither before him.

He had already hastened around another way, however, as to meet her in her quick circuit of the hall. “That’s all you’ve got to say to me after what has passed between us?”

He had stopped her thus, but she had also stopped him, and her passionate denial set him a limit. “I’ve got to say—sorry as I am—that if you must have an answer it’s this: that never, Lord John, never, can there be anything more between us.” And her gesture cleared her path, permitting her to achieve her flight. “Never, no, never,” she repeated as she went—“never, never, never!” She got off by the door at which she had been aiming to some retreat of her own, while aghast and defeated, left to make the best of it, he sank after a moment into a chair and remained quite pitiably staring before him, appealing to the great blank splendour.