of one!"

"At the worst then, you see"--she maintained her optimism--"the
recipient of royal attentions!"

"Oh," said her companion, whom his honour seemed to leave comparatively
cold, "it's simply as if the gracious Personage were coming to condole!"

Impatient of the lapse of time, in any case, she assured herself again
of the hour. "Well, if he only does come!"

"John--the wretch!" Lord Theign returned--"will take care of that: he
has nailed him and will bring him."

"What was it then," his friend found occasion in the particular tone of
this reference to demand, "what was it that, when you sent him off, John
spoke of you in Bond Street as specifically intending?"

Oh he saw it now all lucidly--if not rather luridly--and thereby
the more tragically. "He described me in his nasty rage as
consistently--well, heroic!"

"His rage"--she pieced it sympathetically out--"at your destroying his
cherished credit with Bender?"

Lord Theign was more and more possessed of this view of the manner of
it. "I had come between him and some profit that he doesn't confess to,
but that made him viciously and vindictively serve me up there, as he
caught the chance, to the Prince--and the People!"

She cast about, in her intimate interest, as for some closer conception
of it. "By saying that you had remarked here that you offered the People
the picture--?"

"As a sacrifice--yes!--to morbid, though respectable scruples." To which
he sharply added, as if struck with her easy grasp of the scene: "But I
hope you've nothing to call a memory for any such extravagance?"

Lady Sandgate waited--then boldly took her line. "None whatever! You had
reacted against Bender--but you hadn't gone so far as _that!_"

He had it now all vividly before him. "I had reacted--like a gentleman;
but it didn't thereby follow that I acted--or spoke--like a demagogue;
and my mind's a complete blank on the subject of my having done so."

"So that there only flushes through your conscience," she suggested,
"the fact that he has forced your hand?"

Fevered with the sore sense of it his lordship wiped his brow. "He has
played me, for spite, his damned impertinent trick!"

She found but after a minute--for it wasn't easy--the right word, or the
least wrong, for the situation. "Well, even if he did so diabolically
commit you, you still don't want--do you?--to back out?"

Resenting the suggestion, which restored all his nobler form, Lord
Theign fairly drew