avowal, the rest of that illumination
called for a different intelligence. "Your father's reprobation of me
personally is on the ground that you're all such great people?"

She spared him the invidious answer to this as, a moment before, his
eagerness had spared her reserve; she flung over the "ground" that his
question laid bare the light veil of an evasion, "'Great people,' I've
learned to see, mustn't--to remain great--do what my father's doing."

"It's indeed on the theory of their not so behaving," Hugh returned,
"that we see them--all the inferior rest of us--in the grand glamour of
their greatness!"

If he had spoken to meet her admirable frankness half-way, that beauty
in her almost brushed him aside to make at a single step the rest of the
journey. "You won't see them in it for long--if they don't now, under
such tests and with such opportunities, begin to take care."

This had given him, at a stroke, he clearly felt, all freedom for the
closer criticism. "Lord Theign perhaps recognises some such canny truth,
but 'takes care,' with the least trouble to himself and the finest short
cut--does it, if you'll let me say so, rather on the cheap--by finding
'the likes' of me, as his daughter's trusted friend, out of the
question."

"Well, you won't mind that, will you?" Lady Grace asked, "if he finds
his daughter herself, in any such relation to you, quite as much so."

"Different enough, from position to position and person to person," he
brightly brooded, "is the view that gets itself _most_ comfortably taken
of the implications of Honour!"

"Yes," the girl returned; "my father, in the act of despoiling us
all, all who are interested, without apparently the least unpleasant
consciousness, keeps the balance showily even, to his mostly so fine,
so delicate sense, by suddenly discovering that he's scandalised at my
caring for your friendship."

Hugh looked at her, on this, as with the gladness verily of possession
promised and only waiting--or as if from that moment forth he had her
assurance of everything that most concerned him and that might
most inspire. "Well, isn't the moral of it all simply that what his
perversity of pride, as we can only hold it, will have most done for us
is to bring us--and to keep us--blessedly together?"

She seemed for a moment to question his "simply." "Do you regard us as
so much 'together' when you remember where, in spite of everything, I've
put myself?"

"By telling him t