“I dare say not!”—Lord Theign, flushed with the felicity of self-expression, made little of that. “But he goes too far, you see, and it clears the air—pouah! Now therefore”—and he glanced at the clock—“I must go to Kitty.”
“Kitty—with what Kitty wants,” Lady Sandgate opined—“won’t thank you for that!”
“She never thanks me for anything”—and the fact of his resignation clearly added here to his bitterness. “So it’s no great loss!”
“Won’t you at any rate,” his hostess asked, “wait for Bender?”
His lordship cast it to the winds. “What have I to do with him now?”
“Why surely if he’ll accept your own price—!”
Lord Theign thought—he wondered; and then as if fairly amused at himself: “Hanged if I know what is my own price!” After which he went for his hat. “But there’s one thing,” he remembered as he came back with it: “where’s my too, too unnatural daughter?”
“If you mean Grace and really want her I’ll send and find out.”
“Not now”—he bethought himself. “But does she see that chatterbox?”
“Mr. Crimble? Yes, she sees him.”