The pair passed the window, absorbed apparently in conversation. Mrs. French escaped. Lady Barnes was left to discontent and solitude.
But the solitude was not for long.
When Elsie French descended for tea, an hour later, she was aware, from a considerable distance, of people and tumult in the drawing-room. Daphne's soprano voice—agreeable, but making its mark always, like its owner—could be heard running on. The young mistress of the house seemed to be admonishing, instructing, someone. Could it be her mother-in-law?
When Elsie entered, Daphne was walking up and down in excitement.
"One cannot really live with bad pictures because they happen to be one's ancestors! We won't do them any harm, mamma! of course not. There is a room upstairs where they can be stored—most carefully—and anybody who is interested in them can go and look at them. If they had only been left as they were painted!—not by Lely, of course, but by some drapery man in his studio—passe encore! they might have been just bearable. But you see some wretched restorer went and daubed them all over a few years ago."
"We went to the best man we could find! We took the best advice!" cried Lady Barnes, sitting stiff and crimson in a deep arm-chair, opposite the luckless row of portraits that Daphne was denouncing.
"I'm sure you did. But then, you see, nobody knew anything at all about it in those days. The restorers were all murderers. Ask Dr. Lelius."
Daphne pointed to the stranger, who was leaning against an arm-chair beside her in an embarrassed attitude, as though he were endeavouring to make the chair a buffer between himself and Lady Barnes.
Dr. Lelius bowed.
"It is a modern art," he said with diffidence, and an accent creditably slight—"a quite modern art. We hafe a great man at Würzburg."