III

Summary

LEFT with her friend, Lady Grace had a prompt question. “Lord John warned me he was ‘funny’; but you already know him?”

There might have been a sense of embarrassment in the way in which, as to gain time, Lady Sandgate pointed, instead of answering, to the small picture pronounced upon by Mr. Bender. “He thinks your little Cuyp a fraud.”

“That one?” Lady Grace could but stare. “The wretch!” However, she made, without alarm, no more of it; she returned to her previous question. “You’ve met him before?”

“Just a little—in town. Being ‘after pictures,’” Lady Sandgate explained, “he has been after my great-grandmother.”

“She,” said Lady Grace with amusement, “must have found him funny! But he can clearly take care of himself, while Kitty takes care of Lord John, and while you, if you’ll be so good, go back to support father—in the hour of his triumph: which he wants you so much to witness that he complains of your desertion and goes so far as to speak of you as sneaking away.”

Lady Sandgate, with a slight flush, turned it over. “I delight in his triumph, and whatever I do is at least above board; but if it's a question of support aren't you yourself failing him quite as much?”

This had, however, no effect on the girl's confidence. “Ah, my dear, I’m not at all the same thing, and as I’m the person in the world he least misses—” Well, such a fact spoke for itself.

“You’ve been free to return and wait for Lord John?”—that was the sense in which the elder woman appeared to prefer to understand it as speaking.

The tone of it, none the less, led her companion immediately, though very quietly, to correct her. “I’ve not come back to wait for Lord John.”

“Then he hasn't told you—if you’ve talked—with what idea he has come?”

Lady Grace had for a further correction the same shade of detachment. “Kitty has told me—what it suits her to pretend to suppose.”