FACE to face with his visitor the master of Dedborough betrayed the impression his daughter appeared to have given him. “She didn't want to go?” And then before Lord John could reply: “What the deuce is the matter with her?”

Lord John took his time. “I think perhaps a little Mr. Crimble.”

“And who the deuce is a little Mr. Crimble?”

“A young man who was just with her—and whom she appears to have invited.”

“Where is he then?” Lord Theign demanded.

“Off there among the pictures—which he seems partly to have come for.”

“Oh!”—it made his lordship easier. “Then he's all right—on such a day.”

His companion could none the less just wonder. “Hadn't Lady Grace told you?”

“That he was coming? Not that I remember.” But Lord Theign, perceptibly preoccupied, made nothing of this. “We’ve had other fish to fry, and you know the freedom I allow her.”

His friend had a vivid gesture. “My dear man, I only ask to profit by it!” With which there might well have been in Lord John's face a light of comment on the pretension in such a quarter to allow freedom.

Yet it was a pretension that Lord Theign sustained—as to show himself far from all bourgeois narrowness. “She has her friends by the score—at this time of day.” There was clearly a claim here also—to know the time of day. “But in the matter of friends where, by the way, is your own—of whom I’ve but just heard?”

“Oh, off there among the pictures too; so they’ll have met and taken care of each other.” Accounting for this inquirer would be clearly the least of Lord John's difficulties. “I mustn't appear to Bender to have failed him; but I must at once let you know, before I join him, that, seizing my opportunity, I have just very definitely, in fact very pressingly, spoken to Lady Grace. It hasn't been perhaps,” he continued, “quite the pick of a chance; but that seemed never to come, and if I’m not too fondly mistaken, at any rate, she listened to me without abhorrence. Only I’ve led her to expect— for our case—that you’ll be so good, without loss of time, as to say the clinching word to her yourself.”