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