Our young man showed another face than the face his friend had lately seen him carry off, and he now turned it distressfully from that source of inspiration to Lord Theign, who was flagrantly, even from this first moment, no such source at all, and then from his noble adversary back again, under pressure of difficulty and effort, to Lady Grace, whom he directly addressed. “Here I am again, you see — and I’ve got my news, worse luck!” But his manner to her father was the next instant more brisk. “I learned you were here, my lord; but as the case is important I told them it was all right and came up. I’ve been to my club,” he added for the girl, “and found the tiresome thing —!” But he broke down breathless.

“And it isn’t good?” she cried with the highest concern.

Ruefully, yet not abjectly, he confessed, “Not so good as I hoped. For I assure you, my lord, I counted —”

“It’s the report from Pappendick about the picture at Verona,” Lady Grace interruptingly explained.

Hugh took it up, but, as we should well have seen, under embarrassment dismally deeper; the ugly particular defeat he had to announce showing thus, in his thought, for a more awkward force than any reviving possibilities that he might have begun to balance against them. “The man I told you about also,” he said to his formidable patron; “whom I went to Brussels to talk with and who, most kindly, has gone for us to Verona. He has been able to get straight at their Mantovano, but the brute horribly wires me that he doesn’t quite see the thing; see, I mean”— and he gathered his two hearers together now in his overflow of chagrin, conscious, with his break of the ice, more exclusively of that —“my vivid vital point, the absolute screaming identity of the two persons represented. I still hold,” he persuasively went on, “that our man is their man, but Pappendick decides that he isn’t — and as Pappendick has so much to be reckoned with of course I’m awfully abashed.”

Lord Theign had remained what he had begun by being, immeasurably and inaccessibly detached — only with his curiosity more moved than he could help and as, on second thought, to see what sort of a still more offensive fool the heated youth would really make of himself. “Yes — you seem indeed remarkably abashed!”

Hugh clearly was thrown again, by the cold “cut” of this, colder than any mere social ignoring, upon a sense of the damnably poor figure he did offer; so that, while he straightened himself and kept a mastery of his manner and a control of his reply, we should yet have felt his cheek tingle. “I backed my own judgment strongly, I know — and I’ve got my snub. But I don’t in the least knock under.”

“Only the first authority in Europe doesn’t care, I suppose, whether you do or not!”

“He isn’t the first authority in Europe, thank God,” the young man returned —“though he is, I admit, one of the three or four first. And I mean to appeal — I’ve another shot in my locker,” he went on with his rather painfully forced smile to Lady Grace. “I had already written, you see, to dear old Bardi.”

“Bardi of Milan?”— she recognised, it was admirably manifest, the appeal of his directness to her generosity, awkward as their predicament was also for her herself, and spoke to him as she might have spoken without her father’s presence.

It would have shown for beautiful, on the spot, had there been any one to perceive it, that he devoutly recorded her intelligence. “You know of him? — how delightful of you! For the Italians, I now feel,” he quickly explained, “he must have most the instinct — and it has come over me since that he’d have been more our man. Besides of course his so knowing the Verona picture.”

She had fairly hung on his lips. “But does he know ours?”

“No — not ours yet. That is”— he consciously and quickly took himself up —“not yours! But as Pap-pendick went to Verona for us I’ve asked Bardi to do us the great favour to come here — if Lord Theign will be so good,” he said, bethinking himself with a turn, “as to let him examine the Moretto.” He faced again to the personage he mentioned, who, simply standing off and watching, in concentrated interest as well as detachment, this interview of his cool daughter and her still cooler guest, had plainly “elected,” as it were, to give them rope to hang themselves. Staring very hard at Hugh he met his appeal, but in a silence clearly calculated; against which, however, the young man, bearing up, made such head as he could. He offered his next word, that is, equally to the two companions. “It’s not at all impossible — for such curious effects have been! — that the Dedborough picture seen after the Verona will point a different moral from the Verona seen after the Dedborough.”

“And so awfully long after — wasn’t it?” Lady Grace asked.

“Awfully long after — it was years ago that Pappen-dick, being in this country for such purposes, was kindly admitted to your house when none of you were there, or at least visible.”

“Oh of course we don’t see every one!”— she heroically kept it up.

“You don’t see every one,” Hugh bravely laughed, “and that makes it all the more charming that you did, and that you still do, see me. I shall really get Bardi,” he pursued, “to go again to Verona ——”

“The last thing before coming here?”— she had guessed before he could say it; and still she sustained it, so that he could shine at her for assent. “How happy they should like so to work for you!”

“Ah, we’re a band of brothers,” he returned —”‘we few, we happy few’— from country to country”; to which he added, gaining more ease for an eye at Lord Theign: “though we do have our little rubs and disputes, like Pappendick and me now. The thing, you see, is the ripping interest of it all; since,” he developed and explained, for his elder friend’s benefit, with pertinacious cheer and an assurance superficially at least recovered, “when we’re really ‘hit’ over a case we’ll do almost anything in life.”

Lady Grace, recklessly throbbing in the breath of it all, immediately appropriated what her father let alone. “It must be so lovely to feel so hit!”

“It does spoil one,” Hugh laughed, “for milder joys. Of course what I have to consider is the chance — putting it at the merest chance — of Bardi’s own wet blanket! But that’s again so very small — though,” he pulled up with a drop to the comparative dismal, which he offered as an almost familiar tribute to Lord Theign, “you’ll retort upon me naturally that I promised you the possibility of Pappendick’s veto would be: all on the poor dear old basis, you’ll claim, of the wish father to the thought. Well, I do wish to be right as much as I believe I am. Only give me time!” he sublimely insisted.

“How can we prevent your using it?” Lady Grace again interrupted; “or the fact either that if the worst comes to the worst —”

“The thing”— he at once pursued —“will always be at the least the greatest of Morettos? Ah,” he cried so cheerily that there was still a freedom in it toward any it might concern, “the worst sha’n’t come to the worst, but the best to the best: my conviction of which it is that supports me in the deep regret I have to express”— and he faced Lord Theign again —“for any inconvenience I may have caused you by my abortive undertaking. That, I vow here before Lady Grace, I will yet more than make up!”

Lord Theign, after the longest but the blankest contemplation of him, broke hereupon, for the first time, that attitude of completely sustained and separate silence which he had yet made compatible with his air of having deeply noted every eleme............