“Awfully long after—it was years ago that Pappen-dick, being in this country for such purposes, was kindly admitted to your house when none of you were there, or at least visible.”
“Oh of course we don’t see every one!”—she heroically kept it up.
“You don’t see every one,” Hugh bravely laughed, “and that makes it all the more charming that you did, and that you still do, see me. I shall really get Bardi,” he pursued, “to go again to Verona——”
“The last thing before coming here?”—she had guessed before he could say it; and still she sustained it, so that he could shine at her for assent. “How happy they should like so to work for you!”
“Ah, we’re a band of brothers,” he returned—“‘we few, we happy few’—from country to country”; to which he added, gaining more ease for an eye at Lord Theign: “though we do have our little rubs and disputes, like Pappendick and me now. The thing, you see, is the ripping interest of it all; since,” he developed and explained, for his elder friend’s benefit, with pertinacious cheer and an assurance superficially at least recovered, “when we’re really ‘hit’ over a case we’ll do almost anything in life.”
Lady Grace, recklessly throbbing in the breath of it all, immediately appropriated what her father let alone. “It must be so lovely to feel so hit!”
“It does spoil one,” Hugh laughed, “for milder joys. Of course what I have to consider is the chance—putting it at the merest chance—of Bardi’s own wet blanket! But that’s again so very small—though,” he pulled up with a drop to the comparative dismal, which he offered as an almost familiar tribute to Lord Theign, “you’ll retort upon me naturally that I promised you the possibility of Pappendick’s veto would be: all on the poor dear old basis, you’ll claim, of the wish father to the thought. Well, I do wish to be right as much as I believe I am. Only give me time!” he sublimely insisted.
“How can we prevent your using it?” Lady Grace again interrupted; “or the fact either that if the worst comes to the worst—”
“The thing”—he at once pursued—“will always be at the least the greatest of Morettos? Ah,” he cried so cheerily that there was still a freedom in it toward any it might concern, “the worst sha’n’t come to the worst, but the best to the best: my conviction of which it is that supports me in the deep regret I have to express”—and he faced Lord Theign again—“for any inconvenience I may have caused you by my abortive undertaking. That, I vow here before Lady Grace, I will yet more than make up!”
Lord Theign, after the longest but the blankest contemplation of him, broke hereupon, for the first time, that attitude of completely sustained and separate silence which he had yet made compatible with his air of having deeply noted every element of the scene—so that it was of this full view his participation had effectively consisted, “I haven’t the least idea, sir, what you’re talking about!” And he squarely turned his back, strolling toward the other room, the threshold of which he the next moment had passed, remaining scantily within, however, and in sight of the others, not to say of ourselves; even though averted and ostensibly lost in some scrutiny that might have had for its object the great enshrined Lawrence.