“Yes, we’re fellow-critics, father”—she accepted this opening. “I perfectly adopt your term.” But it took her a minute to go further. “I saw Mr. Crim-ble here half an hour ago.”
“Saw him ‘here’?” Lord Theign amazedly asked. “He comes to you here—and Amy Sandgate has been silent?”
“It wasn’t her business to tell you—since, you see, she could leave it to me. And I quite expect,” Lady Grace then produced, “that he’ll come again.”
It brought down with a bang all her father’s authority. “Then I simply exact of you that you don’t see him.”
The pause of which she paid it the deference was charged like a brimming cup. “Is that what you really meant by your condition just now—that when I do see him I shall not speak to him?”
“What I ‘really meant’ is what I really mean—that you bow to the law I lay upon you and drop the man altogether.”
“Have nothing to do with him at all?”
“Have nothing to do with him at all.”
“In fact”—she took it in—“give him wholly up.”
He had an impatient gesture. “You sound as if I asked you to give up a fortune!” And then, though she had phrased his idea without consternation—verily as if it had been in the balance for her—he might have been moved by something that gathered in her eyes. “You’re so wrapped up in him that the precious sacrifice is like that sort of thing?”