ust at the centre," she interrupted, "that you keep
remarkably still, and only in the suburbs that you feel the rage? I
count on dear Theign's doing nothing in the least foolish--!"

"Ah, but he can't have chucked everything for nothing," Lord John
sharply returned; "and wherever you place him in the rumpus he can't
not meet somehow, hang it, such an assault on his character as a great
nobleman and good citizen."

"It's his luck to have become with the public of the newspapers the
scapegoat-in-chief: for the sins, so-called, of a lot of people!" Lady
Sandgate inconclusively sighed.

"Yes," Lord John concluded for her, "the mercenary millions on whose
traffic in their trumpery values--when they're so lucky as to have
any!--_this_ isn't a patch!"

"Oh, there are cases _and_ cases: situations and responsibilities so
intensely differ!"--that appeared on the whole, for her ladyship, the
moral to be gathered.

"Of course everything differs, all round, from everything," Lord John
went on; "and who in the world knows anything of his own case but the
victim of circumstances exposing himself, for the highest and purest
motives, to be literally torn to pieces?"

"Well," said Lady Sandgate as, in her strained suspense, she freshly
consulted her bracelet watch, "I hope he isn't already torn--if you tell
me you've been to Kitty's."

"Oh, he was all right so far: he had arrived and gone out again," the
young man explained, "as Lady Imber hadn't been at home."

"Ah cool Kitty!" his hostess sighed again--but diverted, as she spoke,
by the reappearance of her butler, this time positively preceding Lord
Theign, whom she met, when he presently stood before her, his garb
of travel exchanged for consummate afternoon dress, with yearning
tenderness and compassionate curiosity. "At last, dearest friend--what a
joy! But with Kitty not at home to receive you?"

That young woman's parent made light of it for the indulged creature's
sake. "Oh I knew my Kitty! I dressed and I find her at five-thirty."
To which he added as he only took in further, without expression, Lord
John: "But Bender, who came there before my arrival--he hasn't tried for
me here?"

It was a point on which Lord John himself could at least be expressive.
"I met him at the club at luncheon; he had had your letter--but for
which chance, my dear man, I should have known nothing. You'll see him
all right at this house; but I'm glad, if I may say so, Theign," the
speaker