---!"

"It will first take him in the eye?" Hugh had jumped to her idea, but he
adopted it only to provide: "It might if he didn't now wear goggles, so
to say!--clapped on him too hard by Pappendick's so damnably perverse
opinion." With which, however, he quickly bethought himself. "Ah, of
course, these wretched days, you haven't known of Pappendick's personal
visit. After that wire from Verona I wired him back defiance--"

"And that brought him?" she cried.

"To do the honest thing, yes--I _will_ say for him: to renew, for full
assurance, his early memory of our picture."

She hung upon it. "But only to stick then to what he had telegraphed?"

"To declare that for _him_, lackaday! our thing's a pure Moretto--and
to declare as much, moreover, with all the weight of his authority, to
Bender himself, who of course made a point of seeing him."

"So that Bender"--she followed and wondered--"is, as a consequence,
wholly off?"

It made her friend's humour play up in his acute-ness. "Bender,
Lady Grace, is, by the law of his being, never 'wholly' off--or
on!--anything. He lives, like the moon, in mid-air, shedding his silver
light on earth; never quite gone, yet never _all_ there--save for
inappreciable moments. He _would_ be in eclipse as a peril, I grant,"
Hugh went on--"if the question had struck him as really closed. But
luckily the blessed Press--which is a pure heavenly joy and now quite
immense on it--keeps it open as wide as Piccadilly."

"Which makes, however," Lady Grace discriminated, "for the danger of a
grab."

"Ah, but all the more for the shame of a surrender! Of course I admit
that when it's a question of a life spent, like his, in waiting,
acquisitively, for the cat to jump, the only thing for one, at a given
moment, as against that signal, is to be found one's self by the animal
in the line of its trajectory. That's exactly," he laughed, "where we
are!"

She cast about as intelligently to note the place. "Your great idea, you
mean, _has_ so worked--with the uproar truly as loud as it has seemed to
come to us here?"

"All beyond my wildest hope," Hugh returned; "since the sight of the
picture, flocked to every day by thousands, so beautifully _tells_. That
we must at any cost keep it, that the nation must, and hang on to it
tight, is the cry that fills the air--to the tune of ten letters a day
in the Papers, with every three days a gorgeous leader; to say nothing
of more and more passionate talk