else is it," he asked, "when, having good reasons,
one acts on 'em?"

"You must have an immense array," she sighed, "to fly so in the face of
Opinion!"

"'Opinion'?" he commented--"I fly in its face? Why, the vulgar thing,
as I'm taking my quiet walk, flies in mine! I give it a whack with my
umbrella and send it about its business." To which he added with more
reproach: "It's enough to have been dished by Grace--without _your_
falling away!"

Sadly and sweetly she defended herself. "It's only my great
affection--and all that these years have been for us: _they_ it is that
make me wish you weren't so proud."

"I've a perfect sense, my dear, of what these years have been for us--a
very charming matter. But 'proud' is it you find me of the daughter who
does her best to ruin me, or of the one who does her best to humiliate?"

Lady Sandgate, not undiscernibly, took her choice of ignoring the point
of this. "Your surrenders to Kitty are your own affair--but are you sure
you can really bear to see Grace?"

"I seem expected indeed to bear much," he said with more and more of his
parental bitterness, "but I don't know that I'm yet in a funk before
my child. Doesn't she _want_ to see me, with any contrition, after the
trick she has played me?" And then as his companion's answer failed: "In
spite of which trick you suggest that I should leave the country with no
sign of her explaining--?"

His hostess raised her head. "She does want to see you, I know; but you
must recall the sequel to that bad hour at Dedborough--when it was you
who declined to see _her_."

"Before she left the house with you, the next day, for this?"--he
was entirely reminiscent. "What I recall is that even if I had
condoned--that evening--her deception of _me_ in my folly, I still
loathed, for my friend's sake, her practical joke on poor John."

Lady Sandgate indulged in the shrug conciliatory. "It was your very
complaint that your own appeal to her _became_ an appeal from herself."

"Yes," he returned, so well he remembered, "she was about as civil to
me then--picking a quarrel with me on such a trumped-up ground!--as that
devil of a fellow in the newspaper; the taste of whose elegant remarks,
for that matter, she must now altogether enjoy!"

His good friend showily balanced and might have been about to reply with
weight; but what she in fact brought out was only: "I see you're right
about it: I must let her speak for herself."

"That I shall gr