represented, whatever he might think of it, all her competence to answer for their host.
He scarce thought of it enough, on any side, however, to be diverted from prior dispositions. “I came on an understanding that I should find my friend Lord John, and that Lord Theign would, on his introduction, kindly let me look round. But being before lunch in Bruton Street I knocked at your door–”
“For another look,” she quickly interposed, “at my Lawrence?”
“For another look at you, Lady Sandgate—your great-grandmother wasn’t required. Informed you were here, and struck with the coincidence of my being myself presently due,” he went on, “I despatched you my wire, on coming away, just to keep up your spirits.”
“You don’t keep them up, you depress them to anguish,” she almost passionately protested, “when you don’t tell me you’ll treat!”
He paused in his preoccupation, his perambulation, conscious evidently of no reluctance that was worth a scene with so charming and so hungry a woman. “Well, if it’s a question of your otherwise suffering torments, may I have another interview with the old lady?”
“Dear Mr. Bender, she’s in the flower of her youth; she only yearns for interviews, and you may have,” Lady Sandgate earnestly declared, “as many as you like.”
“Oh, you must be there to protect me!”
“Then as soon as I return–!”
“Well,”—it clearly cost him little to say—“I’ll come right round.”
She joyously registered the vow. “Only meanwhile then, please, never a word!”
“Never a word, certainly. But where all this time,” Mr. Bender asked, “is Lord John?”
Lady Sandgate, as he spoke, found her eyes meeting those of a young woman who, presenting herself from without, stood framed in the doorway to the terrace; a slight fair grave young woman, of middle, stature and simply dressed, whose brow showed clear even under the heavy shade of a large hat surmounted with big black bows and feathers. Her eyes had vaguely questioned those of her elder, who at once replied to the gentleman forming the subject of their inquiry: “Lady Grace must know.” At this the young woman came forward, and Lady Sandgate introduced the visitor. “My dear Grace, this is Mr. Breckenridge Bender.”
The younger daughter of the house might have arrived in preoccupation, but she had urbanity to spare. “Of whom Lord John has told me,” she returned, “and whom I’m glad to see. Lord John,” she explained to his waiting friend, “is detained a moment in the park, open to-day to a big Temperance school-feast, where our party is mostly gathered; so that if you care to go out—!” She gave him in fine his choice.
But this was clearly a thing that, in the conditions, Mr. Bender wasn’t the man to take precipitately; though his big useful smile disguised his prudence. “Are there any pictures in the park?”
Lady Grace’s facial response represented less humour perhaps, but more play. “We find our park itself rather a picture.”
Mr. Bender’s own levity at any rate persisted. “With a big Temperance school-feast?”
“Mr. Bender’s a great judge of pictures,” Lady Sandgate said as to forestall any impression of excessive freedom.
“Will there be more tea?” he pursued, almost presuming on this.
It showed Lady Grace for comparatively candid and literal. “Oh, there’ll be plenty of tea.”
This appeared to determine Mr. Bender. “Well, Lady Grace, I’m after pictures, but I take them ‘neat.’ May I go right round here?”
“Perhaps, love,” Lady Sandgate at once said, “you’ll let me show him.”
“A moment, dear”—Lady Grace gently demurred. “Do go round,” she conformably added to Mr. Bender; “take your ease and your time. Everything’s open and visible, and, with our whole company dispersed, you’ll have the place to yourself.”
He rose, in his genial mass, to the opportunity. “I’ll be in clover—sure!” But present to him was the richest corner of the pasture, which he could fluently enough name. “And I’ll find ‘The Beautiful Duchess of Waterbridge’?”
She indicated, off to the right, where a stately perspective opened, the quarter of the saloon to which we have seen Mr. Banks retire. “At the very end of those rooms.”
He had wide eyes for the vista. “About thirty in a row, hey?” And he was already off. “I’ll work right through!”
III
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
