on.

III

"He can't bear to do it, poor man!" Lady Sand-gate ruefully remarked to
her remaining guest after Lord John had, under extreme pressure, dashed
out to Bond Street.

"I dare say not!"--Lord Theign, flushed with the felicity of
self-expression, made little of that. "But he goes too far, you see,
and it clears the air--pouah! Now therefore"--and he glanced at the
clock--"I must go to Kitty."

"Kitty--with what Kitty wants," Lady Sandgate opined--"won't thank you
for _that!_"

"She never thanks me for anything"--and the fact of his resignation
clearly added here to his bitterness. "So it's no great loss!"

"Won't you at any rate," his hostess asked, "wait for Bender?"

His lordship cast it to the winds. "What have I to do with him now?"

"Why surely if he'll accept your own price--!"

Lord Theign thought--he wondered; and then as if fairly amused at
himself: "Hanged if I know what _is_ my own price!" After which he went
for his hat. "But there's one thing," he remembered as he came back with
it: "where's my too, _too_ unnatural daughter?"

"If you mean Grace and really want her I'll send and find out."

"Not now"--he bethought himself. "But does she _see_ that chatterbox?"

"Mr. Crimble? Yes, she sees him."

He kept his eyes on her. "Then how far has it gone?"

Lady Sandgate overcame an embarrassment. "Well, not even yet, I think,
so far as they'd like."

"They'd 'like'--heaven save the mark!--to marry?"

"I suspect them of it. What line, if it should come to that," she asked,
"would you then take?"

He was perfectly prompt. "The line that for Grace it's simply ignoble."

The force of her deprecation of such language was qualified by tact.
"Ah, darling, as dreadful as _that?_"

He could but view the possibility with dark resentment. "It lets us so
down--from what we've always been and done; so down, down, down that I'm
amazed you don't feel it!"

"Oh, I feel there's still plenty to keep you up!" she soothingly
laughed.

He seemed to consider this vague amount--which he apparently judged,
however, not so vast as to provide for the whole yearning of his nature.
"Well, my dear," he thus more blandly professed, "I shall need all the
extra _agrement_ that your affection can supply."

If nothing could have been, on this, richer response, nothing could
at the same time have bee more pleasing than her modesty. "Ah, my
affectionate Theign, is, as I think you know, a fountain always in
flo