which she added more gravely: "I leave you
the situation--but I'm willing to let you know that I'm all on Grace's
side."

"So am I, _rather!_--please let me frankly say."

He clearly refreshed, he even almost charmed her. "It's the very least
you can say!--though I'm not sure whether you say it as the simplest
or as the very subtlest of men. But in case you don't know as I do how
little the particular candidate I've named----"

"Had a right or a claim to succeed with her?" he broke in--all quick
intelligence here at least. "No, I don't perhaps know as well as you
do--but I think I know as well as I just yet require."

"There you are then! And if you did prevent," his hostess maturely
pursued, "what wouldn't have been--well, good or nice, I'm quite on your
side too."

Our young man seemed to feel the shade of ambiguity, but he reached at
a meaning. "You're with me in my plea for our defending at any cost of
effort or ingenuity--"

"The precious picture Lord Theign exposes?"--she took his presumed sense
faster than he had taken hers. But she hung fire a moment with her reply
to it. "Well, will you keep the secret of everything I've said or say?"

"To the death, to the stake, Lady Sandgate!"

"Then," she momentously returned, "I only want, too, to make Bender
impossible. If you ask me," she pursued, "how I arrange that with my
deep loyalty to Lord Theign----"

"I don't ask you anything of the sort," he interrupted--"I wouldn't ask
you for the world; and my own bright plan for achieving the _coup_ you
mention------"

"You'll have time, at the most," she said, consulting afresh her
bracelet watch, "to explain to Lady Grace." She reached an electric
bell, which she touched--facing then her visitor again with an abrupt
and slightly embarrassed change of tone. "You do think _my_ great
portrait splendid?"

He had strayed far from it and all too languidly came back. "Your
Lawrence there? As I said, magnificent."

But the butler had come in, interrupting, straight from the lobby; of
whom she made her request. "Let her ladyship know--Mr. Crimble."

Gotch looked hard at Hugh and the crumpled hat--almost as if having an
option. But he resigned himself to repeating, with a distinctness that
scarce fell short of the invidious, "Mr. Crimble," and departed on his
errand.

Lady Sandgate's fair flush of diplomacy had meanwhile not faded.
"Couldn't you, with your immense cleverness and power, get the
Government to do som