fer; so that, while he straightened himself and kept a mastery of
his manner and a control of his reply, we should yet have felt his cheek
tingle. "I backed my own judgment strongly, I know--and I've got my
snub. But I don't in the least knock under."

"Only the first authority in Europe doesn't care, I suppose, whether you
do or not!"

"He isn't _the_ first authority in Europe, thank God," the young man
returned--"though he is, I admit, one of the three or four first. And
I mean to appeal--I've another shot in my locker," he went on with his
rather painfully forced smile to Lady Grace. "I had already written, you
see, to dear old Bardi."

"Bardi of Milan?"--she recognised, it was admirably manifest, the appeal
of his directness to her generosity, awkward as their predicament was
also for her herself, and spoke to him as she might have spoken without
her father's presence.

It would have shown for beautiful, on the spot, had there been any one
to perceive it, that he devoutly recorded her intelligence. "You know of
him?--how delightful of you! For the Italians, I now feel," he quickly
explained, "he must have _most_ the instinct--and it has come over me
since that he'd have been more our man. Besides of course his so knowing
the Verona picture."

She had fairly hung on his lips. "But does he know ours?"

"No--not ours yet. That is"--he consciously and quickly took himself
up--"not yours! But as Pap-pendick went to Verona for us I've asked
Bardi to do us the great favour to come here--if Lord Theign will be so
good," he said, bethinking himself with a turn, "as to let him examine
the Moretto." He faced again to the personage he mentioned, who,
simply standing off and watching, in concentrated interest as well as
detachment, this interview of his cool daughter and her still cooler
guest, had plainly "elected," as it were, to give them rope to hang
themselves. Staring very hard at Hugh he met his appeal, but in a
silence clearly calculated; against which, however, the young man,
bearing up, made such head as he could. He offered his next word, that
is, equally to the two companions. "It's not at all impossible--for such
curious effects have been!--that the Dedborough picture seen _after_
the Verona will point a different moral from the Verona seen after the
Dedborough."

"And so awfully _long_ after--wasn't it?" Lady Grace asked.

"Awfully long after--it was years ago that Pappen-dick, being in this
country for s