himself up. "When did I ever in all my life back
out?"

"Never, never in all your life of course!"--she dashed a bucketful at
the flare. "And the picture after all----!"

"The picture after all"--he took her up in cold grim gallant
despair--"has just been pronounced definitely priceless." And then
to meet her gaping ignorance: "By Mr. Crimble's latest and apparently
greatest adviser, who strongly stamps it a Mantovano and whose practical
affidavit I now possess."

Poor Lady Sandgate gaped but the more--she wondered and yearned.
"Definitely priceless?"

"Definitely priceless." After which he took from its place of lurking,
considerately unfolding it, the goodly slip he had removed from her
blotting-book. "Worth even more therefore than what Bender so blatantly
offers."

Her attention fell with interest, from the distance at which she
stood, on this confirmatory document, her recognition of which was not
immediate. "And is that the affidavit?"

"This is a cheque to your order, my lady, for ten thousand pounds."

"Ten thousand?"--she echoed it with a shout.

"Drawn by some hand unknown," he went on quietly.

"Unknown?"--again, in her muffled joy, she let it sound out.

"Which I found there at your desk a moment ago, and thought best, in
your interest, to rescue from accident or neglect; even though it be,
save for the single stroke of a name begun," he wound up with his look
like a playing searchlight, "unhappily unsigned."

"Unsigned?"--the exhibition of her design, of her defeat, kept shaking
her. "Then it isn't good--?"

"It's a Barmecide feast, my dear!"--he had still, her kind friend, his
note of grimness and also his penetration of eye. "But who is it writes
you colossal cheques?"

"And then leaves them lying about?" Her case was so bad that you
would have seen how she felt she must _do_ something--something quite
splendid. She recovered herself, she faced the situation with all her
bright bravery of expression and aspect; conscious, you might have
guessed, that she had never more strikingly embodied, on such lines, the
elegant, the beautiful and the true. "Why, who can it have been but poor
Breckenridge too?"

"'Breckenridge'--?" Lord Theign had _his_ smart echoes. "What in the
world does he owe you money for?"

It took her but an instant more--she performed the great repudiation
quite as she might be prepared to sweep, in the Presence impending,
her grandest curtsey. "_Not_, you sweet suspicious