diocrity. Yet a noble duplicity was what, as they intimately faced
the situation, Peter went on requiring; and it was still for a time
what his young friend, bitter and sore, managed loyally to comfort him
with. Fifty pounds more than once again, it was true, rewarded both
in London and in Paris the young friend's loyalty; none the less
sensibly, doubtless, at the moment, that the money was a direct
advance on a decent sum for which Peter had long since privately
prearranged an ultimate function. Whether by these arts or others, at
all events, Lance's just resentment was kept for a season--but only
for a season--at bay. The day arrived when he warned his companion
that he could hold out--or hold in--no longer. Carrara Lodge had
had to listen to another lecture delivered from a great height--an
infliction really heavier at last than, without striking back or in
some way letting the Master have the truth, flesh and blood could
bear.

'And what I don't see is,' Lance observed with a certain irritated
eye for what was after all, if it came to that, owing to himself too;
'what I don't see is, upon my honour, how _you_, as things are going,
can keep the game up.'

'Oh the game for me is only to hold my tongue,' said placid Peter.
'And I have my reason.'

'Still my mother?'

Peter showed a queer face as he had often shown it before--that is
by turning it straight away. 'What will you have? I haven't ceased to
like her.'

'She's beautiful--she's a dear of course,' Lance allowed; 'but what
is she to you, after all, and what is it to you that, as to anything
whatever, she should or she shouldn't?'

Peter, who had turned red, hung fire a little. 'Well--it's all simply
what I make of it.'

There was now, however, in his young friend a strange, an adopted
insistence. 'What are you after all to _her_?'

'Oh nothing. But that's another matter.'

'She cares only for my father,' said Lance the Parisian.

'Naturally--and that's just why.'

'Why you've wished to spare her?'

'Because she cares so tremendously much.'

Lance took a turn about the room, but with his eyes still on his host.
'How awfully--always--you must have liked her!'

'Awfully. Always,' said Peter Brench.

The young man continued for a moment to muse--then stopped again in
front of him. 'Do you know how much she cares?' Their eyes met on it,
but Peter, as if his own found something new in Lance's, appeared to
hesitate, for the first time in an age, to