from you again?"

Lady Grace's answer to this was to turn, as he drew nearer, to the
person by whom they were now joined. "Lord John desires you should tell
me, father, how good you think him."

"'Good,' my dear?--good for what?" said Lord Theign a trifle absurdly,
but looking from one of them to the other.

"I feel I must ask _him_ to tell you."

"Then I shall give him a chance--as I should particularly like you to go
back and deal with those overwhelming children."

"Ah, they don't overwhelm _you_, father!"--the girl put it with some
point.

"If you mean to say I overwhelmed _them_, I dare say I did," he
replied--"from my view of that vast collective gape of six hundred
painfully plain and perfectly expressionless faces. But that was only
for the time: I pumped advice--oh _such_ advice!--and they held the
large bucket as still as my pet pointer, when I scratch him, holds his
back. The bucket, under the stream--"

"Was bound to overflow?" Lady Grace suggested.

"Well, the strong recoil of the wave of intelligence has been not
unnaturally followed by the formidable break. You must really," Lord
Theign insisted, "go and deal with it."

His daughter's smile, for all this, was perceptibly cold. "You work
people up, father, and then leave others to let them down."

"The two things," he promptly replied, "require different natures." To
which he simply added, as with the habit of authority, though not of
harshness, "Go!"

It was absolute and she yielded; only pausing an instant to look as with
a certain gathered meaning from one of the men to the other. Faintly and
resignedly sighing she passed away to the terrace and disappeared.

"The nature that _can_ let you down--I rather like it, you know!" Lord
John threw off. Which, for an airy elegance in them, were perhaps just
slightly rash words--his companion gave him so sharp a look as the two
were left together.

VI

Face to face with his visitor the master of Dedborough betrayed the
impression his daughter appeared to have given him. "She didn't want
to go?" And then before Lord John could reply: "What the deuce is the
matter with her?"

Lord John took his time. "I think perhaps a little Mr. Crimble."

"And who the deuce is a little Mr. Crimble?"

"A young man who was just with her--and whom she appears to have
invited."

"Where is he then?" Lord Theign demanded.

"Off there among the pictures--which he seems partly to have come for."

"Oh!"--i