“Had a right or a claim to succeed with her?” he broke in—all quick intelligence here at least. “No, I don’t perhaps know as well as you do—but I think I know as well as I just yet require.”
“There you are then! And if you did prevent,” his hostess maturely pursued, “what wouldn’t have been—well, good or nice, I’m quite on your side too.”
Our young man seemed to feel the shade of ambiguity, but he reached at a meaning. “You’re with me in my plea for our defending at any cost of effort or ingenuity—”
“The precious picture Lord Theign exposes?”—she took his presumed sense faster than he had taken hers. But she hung fire a moment with her reply to it. “Well, will you keep the secret of everything I’ve said or say?”
“To the death, to the stake, Lady Sandgate!”
“Then,” she momentously returned, “I only want, too, to make Bender impossible. If you ask me,” she pursued, “how I arrange that with my deep loyalty to Lord Theign——”
“I don’t ask you anything of the sort,” he interrupted—“I wouldn’t ask you for the world; and my own bright plan for achieving the coup you mention———”
“You’ll have time, at the most,” she said, consulting afresh her bracelet watch, “to explain to Lady Grace.” She reached an electric bell, which she touched—facing then her visitor again with an abrupt and slightly embarrassed change of tone. “You do think my great portrait splendid?”
He had strayed far from it and all too languidly came back. “Your Lawrence there? As I said, magnificent.”
But the butler had come in, interrupting, straight from the lobby; of whom she made her request. “Let her ladyship know—Mr. Crimble.”