ready pretty far on the way to it," Lord Petherton
resumed, "what on earth MIGHT we arrive at in the absence of your
control? I warn you, Duchess," he joyously pursued, "that if you go out
of the room with Mitchy I shall rapidly become quite awful."

The Duchess during this brief passage never took her eyes from her
niece, who rewarded her attention with the sweetness of consenting
dependence. The child's foreign origin was so delicately but
unmistakeably written in all her exquisite lines that her look might
have expressed the modest detachment of a person to whom the language
of her companions was unknown. Her protectress then glanced round the
circle. "You're very odd people all of you, and I don't think you quite
know how ridiculous you are. Aggie and I are simple stranger-folk;
there's a great deal we don't understand, yet we're none the less not
easily frightened. In what is it, Mr. Mitchett," the Duchess asked,
"that I've wounded your susceptibilities?"

Mr. Mitchett cast about; he had apparently found time to reflect on his
precipitation. "I see what Petherton's up to, and I won't, by drawing
you aside just now, expose your niece to anything that might immediately
oblige Mrs. Brook to catch her up and flee with her. But the first
time I find you more isolated--well," he laughed, though not with the
clearest ring, "all I can say is Mind your eyes dear Duchess!"

"It's about your thinking, Jane," Mrs. Brookenham placidly explained,
"that Nanda suffers--in her morals, don't you know?--by my neglect.
I wouldn't say anything about you that I can't bravely say TO you;
therefore since he has plumped out with it I do confess that I've
appealed to him on what, as so good an old friend, HE thinks of your
contention."

"What in the world IS Jane's contention?" Edward Brookenham put the
question as if they were "stuck" at cards.

"You really all of you," the Duchess replied with excellent coolness,
"choose extraordinary conditions for the discussion of delicate matters.
There are decidedly too many things on which we don't feel alike. You're
all inconceivable just now. Je ne peux pourtant pas la mettre a la
porte, cette cherie"--whom she covered again with the gay solicitude
that seemed to have in it a vibration of private entreaty: "Don't
understand, my own darling--don't understand!"

Little Aggie looked about with an impartial politeness that, as
an expression of the general blind sense of her being as to every
pa