“May I go with him?”
Her father looked at the question as at some cup of supreme bitterness—a nasty and now quite regular dose with which his lips were familiar, but before which their first movement was always tightly to close. “With me, my lord,” said Hugh at last, thoroughly determined they should open and intensifying the emphasis.
He had his effect, and Lord Theign’s answer, addressed to Lady Grace, made indifference very comprehensive. “You may do what ever you dreadfully like!”
At this then the girl, with an air that seemed to present her choice as absolutely taken, reached the door which Hugh had come across to open for her.
Here she paused as for another, a last look at her father, and her expression seemed to say to him unaidedly that, much as she would have preferred to proceed to her act without this gross disorder, she could yet find inspiration too in the very difficulty and the old faiths themselves that he left her to struggle with. All this made for depth and beauty in her serious young face—as it had indeed a force that, not indistinguishably, after an instant, his lordship lost any wish for longer exposure to. His shift of his attitude before she went out was fairly an evasion; if the extent of the levity of one of his daughter’s made him afraid, what might have been his present strange sense but a fear of the other from the extent of her gravity? Lady Grace passes from us at any rate in her laced and pearled and plumed slimness and her pale concentration—leaving her friend a moment, however, with his hand on the door.
“You thanked me just now for Bardi’s opinion after all,” Hugh said with a smile; “and it seems to me that—after all as well—I’ve grounds for thanking you!” On which he left his benefactor alone.
“Tit for tat!” There broke from Lord Theign, in his solitude, with the young man out of earshot, that vague ironic comment; which only served his turn, none the less, till, bethinking himself, he had gone back to the piece of furniture used for his late scribble and come away from it again the next minute delicately holding a fair slip that we naturally recognise as Mr. Bender’s forgotten cheque. This apparently surprising value he now studied at his ease and to the point of its even drawing from him an articulate “What in damnation—?” His speculation dropped before the return of his hostess, whose approach through the other room fell upon his ear and whom he awaited after a quick thrust of the cheque into his waistcoat.
Lady Sandgate appeared now in due—that is in the most happily adjusted—splendour; she had changed her dress for something smarter and more appropriate to the entertainment of Princes, “Tea will be downstairs,” she said. “But you’re alone?”
“I’ve just parted,” her friend replied, “with Grace and Mr. Crimble.”
“‘Parted’ with them?”—the ambiguity struck her.