question got itself but dryly treated, as if it might be a commercially calculating or interested one. “Oh, not sell it again.”
“Then ship it to New York?” the inquirer pursued, defining himself somehow as not snubbed and, from this point, not snubbable.
That appearance failed none the less to deprive Lord John of a betrayed relish for being able to displease Lady Grace’s odd guest by large assent. “As fast as ever he can—and you can land things there now, can’t you? in three or four days.”
“I dare say. But can’t he be induced to have a little mercy?” Hugh sturdily pursued.
Lord John pushed out his lips. “A ‘little’? How much do you want?”
“Well, one wants to be able somehow to stay his hand.”
“I doubt if you can any more stay Mr. Bender’s hand than you can empty his purse.”
“Ah, the Despoilers!” said Crimble with strong expression. “But it’s we,” he added, “who are base.”
“‘Base’?”—and Lord John’s surprise was apparently genuine.
“To want only to ‘do business,’ I mean, with our treasures, with our glories.”
Hugh’s words exhaled such a sense of peril as to draw at once Lady Grace. “Ah, but if we’re above that here, as you know–!”
He stood smilingly corrected and contrite. “Of course I know—but you must forgive me if I have it on the brain. And show me first of all, won’t you? the Moretto of Brescia.”
“You know then about the Moretto of Brescia?”
“Why, didn’t you tell me yourself?” It went on between them for the moment quite as if there had been no Lord John.
“Probably, yes,” she recalled; “so how I must have swaggered!” After which she turned to the other visitor with a kindness strained clear of urgency. “Will you also come?”
He confessed to a difficulty—which his whole face begged her also to take account of. “I hoped you’d be at leisure—for something I’ve so at heart!”
This had its effect; she took a rapid decision and turned persuasively to Crimble—for whom, in like manner, there must have been something in her face. “Let Mr. Bender himself then show you. And there are things in the library too.”
“Oh yes, there are things in the library.” Lord John, happy in his gained advantage and addressing Hugh from the strong ground of an initiation already complete, quite sped him on the way.
Hugh clearly made no attempt to veil the penetration with which he was moved to look from one of these counsellors to the other, though with a ready “Thank-you!” for Lady Grace he the next instant started in pursuit of Mr. Bender.
V
“Your friend seems remarkably hot!” Lord John remarked to his young hostess as soon as they had been left together.
“He has cycled twenty miles. And indeed,” she smiled, “he does appear to care for what he cares for!”
Her companion then, during a moment’s silence, might have been noting the emphasis of her assent. “Have you known him long?”
“No—not long.”
“Nor seen him often?”
“Only once—till now.”
“Oh!” said Lord John with another pause. But he soon proceeded. “Let us leave him then to cool! I haven’t cycled twenty miles, but I’ve motored forty very much in the hope of this, Lady Grace—the chance of being able to assure you that I too care very much for what I care for.” To which he added on an easier note, as to carry off a slight awkwardness while she only waited: “You certainly mustn’t let yourself—between us all—be worked to death.”
“Oh, such days as this—I” She made light enough of her burden.
“They don’t come often to me at least, Lady Grace! I hadn’t grasped in advance the scale of your fête,” he went on; “but since I’ve the great luck to find you alone—!” He paused for breath, however, before the full sequence.
She helped him out as through common kindness, but it was a trifle colourless. “Alone or in company, Lord John, I’m always very glad to see you.”
“Then that assurance helps me to wonder if you don’t perhaps gently guess what it is I want to say.” This time indeed she left him to his wonder, so that he had to support himself. “I’ve tried, all considerately—these three months—to let you see for yourself how I feel. I feel very strongly, Lady Grace; so that at last”—and his impatient sincerity took after another instant the jump—“well, I regularly worship you. You’re my absolute ideal. I think of you the whole time.”
She measured out consideration as if it had been a yard of pretty ribbon. “Are you sure you know me enough?”
“I think I know a perfect woman when I see one!” Nothing now at least could have been more prompt, and while a decent pity for such a mistake showed in her smile he followed it up. “Isn’t what you rather mean that you haven’t cared sufficiently to know me? If so, that can be little by little mended, Lady Grace.” He was in fact altogether gallant about it. “I’m aware of the limits of what I have to show or to offer, but I defy you to find a limit to my possible devotion.”
She deferred to that, but taking it in a lower key. “I believe you’d be very good to me.”
“Well, isn’t that something to start with?”—he fairly pounced on it. “I’ll do any blest thing in life you like, I’ll accept any condition you impose, if you’ll only tell me you see your way.”
“Shouldn’t I have a little more first to see yours?” she asked. “When you say you’ll do anything in life I like, isn’t there anything you yourself want strongly enough to do?”
He cast a stare about on the suggestions of the scene. “Anything that will make money, you mean?”
“Make money or make reputation—or even just make the time pass.”
“Oh, what I have to look to in the way of a career?” If that was her meaning he could show after an instant that he didn’t fear it. “Well, your father, dear delightful man, has been so good as to give me to understand that he backs me for a decent deserving creature; and I’ve noticed, as you doubtless yourself have, that when Lord Theign backs a fellow–!”
He left the obvious moral for her to take up—which she did, but all interrogatively. “The fellow at once comes in for something awfully good?”
“I don’t in the least mind your laughing at me,” Lord John returned, “for when I put him the question of the lift he’d give me by speaking to you first he bade me simply remember the complete personal liberty in which he leaves you, and yet which doesn’t come—take my word!” said the young man sagely—“from his being at all indifferent.”
“No,” she answered—“father isn’t indifferent. But father’s ‘great’”
“Great
