e motor-cap he had lain down on coming in. "I rush
to Lady Grace, but don't demoralise Bender!" And he went forth to the
terrace and the gardens.

Banks looked about as for some further exercise of his high function.
"Will you have tea, my lady?"

This appeared to strike her as premature. "Oh, thanks--when they all
come in."

"They'll scarcely _all_, my lady"--he indicated respectfully that he
knew what he was talking about. "There's tea in her ladyship's tent;
but," he qualified, "it has also been ordered for the saloon."

"Ah then," she said cheerfully, "Mr. Bender will be glad--!" And she
became, with this, aware of the approach of another visitor. Banks
considered, up and down, the gentleman ushered in, at the left, by the
footman who had received him at the main entrance to the house. "Here
he must be, my lady." With which he retired to the spacious opposite
quarter, where he vanished, while the footman, his own office performed,
retreated as he had come, and Lady Sandgate, all hospitality, received
the many-sided author of her specious telegram, of Lord John's
irritating confidence and of Lady Lappington's massive cheque.

II

Having greeted him with an explicitly gracious welcome and both hands
out, she had at once gone on: "You'll of course have tea?--in the
saloon."

But his mechanism seemed of the type that has to expand and revolve
before sounding. "Why; the very first thing?"

She only desired, as her laugh showed, to accommodate. "Ah, have it the
last if you like!"

"You see your English teas--!" he pleaded as he looked about him, so
immediately and frankly interested in the place and its contents that
his friend could only have taken this for the very glance with which he
must have swept Lady Lappington's inferior scene.

"They're too much for you?"

"Well, they're too many. I think I've had two or three on the road--at
any rate my man did. I like to do business before--" But his sequence
dropped as his eye caught some object across the wealth of space.

She divertedly picked it up. "Before tea, Mr. Bender?"

"Before everything, Lady Sandgate." He was immensely genial, but a
queer, quaint, rough-edged distinctness somehow kept it safe--for
himself.

"Then you've _come_ to do business?" Her appeal and her emphasis melted
as into a caress--which, however, spent itself on his large high person
as he consented, with less of demonstration but more of attention, to
look down upon her. Sh