She cast about as intelligently to note the place. “Your great idea, you mean, has so worked—with the uproar truly as loud as it has seemed to come to us here?”
“All beyond my wildest hope,” Hugh returned; “since the sight of the picture, flocked to every day by thousands, so beautifully tells. That we must at any cost keep it, that the nation must, and hang on to it tight, is the cry that fills the air—to the tune of ten letters a day in the Papers, with every three days a gorgeous leader; to say nothing of more and more passionate talk all over the place, some of it awfully wild, but all of it wind in our sails.”
“I suppose it was that wind then that blew me round there to see the thing in its new light,” Lady Grace said. “But I couldn’t stay—for tears!”
“Ah,” Hugh insisted on his side for comfort, “we’ll crow loudest yet! And don’t meanwhile, just don’t, those splendid strange eyes of the fellow seem consciously to plead? The women, bless them, adore him, cling to him, and there’s talk of a ‘Ladies’ League of Protest’—all of which keeps up the pitch.”
“Poor Amy and I are a ladies’ league,” the girl joylessly joked—“as we now take in the ‘Journal’ regardless of expense.”
“Oh then you practically have it all—since,” Hugh, added after a brief hesitation, “I suppose Lord Theign himself doesn’t languish uninformed.”
“At far-off Salsomaggiore—by the papers? No doubt indeed he isn’t spared even the worst,” said Lady Grace—“and no doubt too it’s a drag on his cure.”
Her companion seemed struck with her lack of assurance. “Then you don’t—if I may ask—hear from him?”
“I? Never a word.”
“He doesn’t write?” Hugh allowed himself to insist.