The girl came nearer, and if her grave face expressed a pity it yet declined a dread. “Of what suspense do you speak? Your still being without the other opinion—?”
“Ah, that worries me, yes; and all the more, at this hour, as I say, that—” He dropped it, however: “I’ll tell you in a moment! My real torment, all the while, has been not to know, from day to day, what situation, what complication that last scene of ours with your father here has let you in for; and yet at the same time—having no sign nor sound from you!—to see the importance of not making anything possibly worse by approaching you again, however discreetly. I’ve been in the dark,” he pursued, “and feeling that I must leave you there; so that now—just brutally turning up once more under personal need and at any cost—I don’t know whether I most want or most fear what I may learn from you.”
Lady Grace, listening and watching, appeared to choose between different ways of meeting this appeal; she had a pacifying, postponing gesture, marked with a beautiful authority, a sign of the value for her of what she gave precedence to and which waved off everything else. “Have you had—first of all—any news yet of Bardi?”
“That I have is what has driven me straight at you again—since I’ve shown you before how I turn to you at a crisis. He has come as I hoped and like a regular good ‘un,” Hugh was able to state; “I’ve just met him at the station, but I pick him up again, at his hotel in Clifford Street, at five. He stopped, on his way from Dover this morning, to my extreme exasperation, to ‘sample’ Canterbury, and I leave him to a bath and a change and tea. Then swooping down I whirl him round to Bond Street, where his very first apprehension of the thing (an apprehension, oh I guarantee you, so quick and clean and fine and wise) will be the flash-light projected—well,” said the young man, to wind up handsomely, but briefly and reasonably, “over the whole field of our question.”
She panted with comprehension. “That of the two portraits being but the one sitter!”
“That of the two portraits being but the one sitter. With everything so to the good, more and more, that bangs in, up to the head, the golden nail of authenticity, and”—he quite glowed through his gloom for it—“we take our stand in glory on the last Mantovano in the world.”
It was a presumption his friend visibly yearned for—but over which, too, with her eyes away from him, she still distinguished the shadow of a cloud. “That is if the flash-light comes!”
“That is if it comes indeed, confound it!”—he had to enlarge a little under the recall of past experience. “So now, at any rate, you see my tension!”
She looked at him again as with a vision too full for a waste of words. “While you on your side of course keep well in view Mr. Bender’s.”
“Yes, while I keep well in view Mr. Bender’s; though he doesn’t know, you see, of Bardi’s being at hand.”