wretches, close at his heels, are
always talking for him and of him."

Lord Theign spoke hereupon at last with the air as of an impulse that
had been slowly gathering force. "_You_ talk for him, my dear chap,
pretty well. You urge his case, my honour, quite as if you were assured
of a commission on the job--on a fine ascending scale! Has he put you
up to that proposition, eh? _Do_ you get a handsome percentage and _are_
you to make a good thing of it?"

The young man coloured under this stinging pleasantry--whether from a
good conscience affronted or from a bad one made worse; but he otherwise
showed a bold front, only bending his eyes a moment on his watch.
"As he's to come to you himself--and I don't know why the mischief he
doesn't come!--he will answer you that graceful question."

"Will he answer it," Lord Theign asked, "with the veracity that
the suggestion you've just made on his behalf represents him as so
beautifully adhering to?" On which he again quite fiercely turned his
back and recovered his detachment, the others giving way behind him to a
blanker dismay.

Lord John, in spite of this however, pumped up a tone. "I don't see why
you should speak as if I were urging some abomination."

"Then I'll tell you why!"--and Lord Theign was upon him again for the
purpose. "Because I had rather give the cursed thing away outright and
for good and all than that it should hang out there another day in the
interest of such equivocations!"

Lady Sandgate's dismay yielded to her wonder, and her wonder apparently
in turn to her amusement. "'Give it away,' my dear friend, to a man who
only longs to smother you in gold?"

Her dear friend, however, had lost patience with her levity. "Give it
away--just for a luxury of protest and a stoppage of chatter--to some
cause as unlike as possible that of Mr. Bender's power of sound and
his splendid reputation: to the Public, to the Authorities, to the
Thingumbob, to the Nation!"

Lady Sandgate broke into horror while Lord John stood sombre and
stupefied. "Ah, my dear creature, you've flights of extravagance----!"

"One thing's very certain," Lord Theign quite heedlessly pursued--"that
the thought of my property on view there does give intolerably on my
nerves, more and more every minute that I'm conscious of it; so that,
hang it, if one thinks of it, why shouldn't I, for my relief, do again,
damme, _what I like_?--that is bang the door in their faces, have the
show immediate