pursued with some emphasis--"I'm glad, you know, to get hold of
you first."

Lord Theign seemed about to ask for the meaning of this remark, but his
other companion's apprehension had already overflowed. "You haven't come
back, have you--to whatever it may be!--for _trouble_ of any sort with
Breckenridge?"

His lordship transferred his penetration to this fair friend, "Have
you become so intensely absorbed--these remarkable days!--in
'Breckenridge'?"

She felt the shadow, you would have seen, of his claimed right, or at
least privilege, of search--yet easily, after an instant, emerged clear.
"I've thought and dreamt but of _you_--suspicious man!--in proportion as
the clamour has spread; and Mr. Bender meanwhile, if you want to know,
hasn't been near me once!"

Lord John came in a manner, and however unconsciously, to her aid.
"You'd have seen, if he had been, what's the matter with him, I
think--and what perhaps Theign has seen from his own letter: since," he
went on to his fellow-visitor, "I understood him a week ago to have been
much taken up with writing you."

Lord Theign received this without comment, only again with an air of
expertly sounding the speaker; after which he gave himself afresh for
a moment to Lady Sandgate. "I've not come home for any clamour, as you
surely know me well enough to believe; or to notice for a minute the
cheapest insolence and aggression--which frankly scarce reached me out
there; or which, so far as it did, I was daily washed clean of by those
blest waters. I returned on Mr. Bender's letter," he then vouchsafed
to Lord John--"three extraordinarily vulgar pages about the egregious
Pap-pendick!"

"About his having suddenly turned up in person, yes, and, as
Breckenridge says, marked the picture down?"--the young man was clearly
all-knowing. "That _has_ of course weighed on Bender--being confirmed
apparently, on the whole, by the drift of public opinion."

Lord Theign took, on this, with a frank show of reaction from some of
his friend's terms, a sharp turn off; he even ironically indicated the
babbler or at least the blunderer in question to Lady Sandgate. "He too
has known me so long, and he comes here to talk to me of 'the drift of
public opinion'!" After which he quite charged at his vain informant.
"Am I to tell you again that I snap my fingers at the drift of public
opinion?--which is but another name for the chatter of all the fools one
doesn't know, in addition to all tho