er'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.

BOOK SECOND

I

LADY SANDGATE, on a morning late in May, entered her dr