ly stopped?" He turned with the attraction of this idea
from one of his listeners to the other. "It's _my_ show--it isn't
Bender's, surely!--and I can do just as I choose with it."

"Ah, but isn't that the very point?"--and Lady Sandgate put it to Lord
John. "Isn't it Bender's show much more than his?"

Her invoked authority, however, in answer to this, made but a motion of
disappointment and disgust at so much rank folly--while Lord Theign, on
the other hand, followed up his happy thought. "Then if it's Bender's
show, or if he claims it is, there's all the more reason!" And it took
his lordship's inspiration no longer to flower. "See here, John--do
this: go right round there this moment, please, and tell them from me to
shut straight down!"

"'Shut straight down'?" the young man abhorrently echoed.

"Stop it _to-night_--wind it up and end it: see?" The more the
entertainer of that vision held it there the more charm it clearly
took on for him. "Have the picture removed from view and the incident
closed."

"You seriously ask _that_ of me!" poor Lord John quavered.

"Why in the world shouldn't I? It's a jolly lot less than you asked of
me a month ago at Dedborough."

"What then am I to say to them?" Lord John spoke but after a long
moment, during which he had only looked hard and--an observer might even
then have felt--ominously at his taskmaster.

That personage replied as if wholly to have done with the matter. "Say
anything that comes into your clever head. I don't really see that
there's anything else _for_ you!" Lady Sandgate sighed to the messenger,
who gave no sign save of positive stiffness.

The latter seemed still to weigh his displeasing obligation; then
he eyed his friend significantly--almost portentously. "Those are
absolutely your sentiments?"

"Those are absolutely my sentiments"--and Lord Theign brought this out
as with the force of a physical push.

"Very well then!" But the young man, indulging in a final, a fairly
sinister, study of such a dealer in the arbitrary, made sure of the
extent, whatever it was, of his own wrong. "Not one more day?"

Lord Theign only waved him away. "Not one more hour!"

He paused at the door, this reluctant spokesman, as if for some supreme
protest; but after another prolonged and decisive engagement with the
two pairs of eyes that waited, though differently, on his performance,
he clapped on his hat as in the rage of his resentment and departed on
his missi