“Well, it was, to me, half an hour ago,” she said as she came nearer. “But if it has since come up?”
“‘If’ it has! But has it? In the form of that monster? What Mr. Bender wants is the great Duchess,” he recalled.
“And my father won’t sell her? No, he won’t sell the great Duchess—there I feel safe. But he greatly needs a certain sum of money—or he thinks he does—and I’ve just had a talk with him.”
“In which he has told you that?”
“He has told me nothing,” Lady Grace said—“or else told me quite other things. But the more I think of them the more it comes to me that he feels urged or tempted—”
“To despoil and denude these walls?” Hugh broke in, looking about in his sharper apprehension.
“Yes, to satisfy, to save my sister. Now do you think our state so ideal?” she asked—but without elation for her hint of triumph.
He had no answer for this save “Ah, but you terribly interest me. May I ask what’s the matter with your sister?”
Oh, she wanted to go on straight now! “The matter is—in the first place—that she’s too dazzlingly, dreadfully beautiful.”
“More beautiful than you?” his sincerity easily risked.