even eighty!"

Hugh Crimble stared as at the odd superfluity of this reassurance,
almost crude on exquisite lips and contradicting an imputation no one
would have indecently made. "Gracious goodness, I hope not! The man
surely doesn't _suppose_ you'd traffic."

She might, while she still smiled at him, have been fairly enjoying the
friendly horror she produced. "I don't quite know what he supposes. But
people _have_ trafficked; people do; people are trafficking all round."

"Ah," Hugh Crimble cried, "that's what deprives me of my rest and, as
a lover of our vast and beneficent art-wealth, poisons my waking hours.
That art-wealth is at the mercy of a leak there appears no means of
stopping." She had tapped a spring in him, clearly, and the consequent
flood might almost at any moment become copious. "Precious things are
going out of our distracted country at a quicker rate than the very
quickest--a century and more ago--of their ever coming in."

She was sharply struck, but was also unmistakably a person in whom
stirred thought soon found connections and relations. "Well, I suppose
our art-wealth came in--save for those awkward Elgin Marbles!--mainly
by purchase too, didn't it? We ourselves largely took it away from
somewhere, didn't we? We didn't _grow_ it all."

"We grew some of the loveliest flowers--and on the whole to-day the most
exposed." He had been pulled up but for an instant. "Great Gainsboroughs
and Sir Joshuas and Romneys and Sargents, great Turners and Constables
and old Cromes and Brabazons, form, you'll recognise, a vast garden in
themselves. What have we ever for instance more successfully grown than
your splendid 'Duchess of Waterbridge'?"

The girl showed herself ready at once to recognise under his eloquence
anything he would. "Yes--it's our Sir Joshua, I believe, that Mr. Bender
has proclaimed himself particularly 'after.'"

It brought a cloud to her friend's face. "Then he'll be capable of
anything."

"Of anything, no doubt, but of making my father capable--! And you
haven't at any rate," she said, "so much as seen the picture."

"I beg your pardon--I saw it at the Guildhall three years ago; and am
almost afraid of getting again, with a fresh sense of its beauty, a
livelier sense of its danger."

Lady Grace, however, was so far from fear that she could even afford
pity. "Poor baffled Mr. Bender!"

"Oh, rich and confident Mr. Bender!" Crimble cried. "Once given his
money, his confidence