If this was ironic the touch fell short, thanks to his perception that they had practically just ceased to be alone. They were in presence of a third figure, who had arrived from the terrace, but whose approach to them was not so immediate as to deprive Lord John of time for another question. “Will you let him tell you, at all events, how good he thinks me?—and then let me come back and have it 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.”