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-