-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.

"Millions of times." Sad, almost sombre, she hadn't a shade of coquetry.
"Kitty has debts--great heaped-up gaming debts."

"But to such amounts?"

"Incredible amounts it appears. And mountains of others too. She throws
herself all on our father."

"And he _has_ to pay them? There's no one else?" Hugh asked.

She waited as if he might answer himself, and then as he apparently
didn't, "He's only afraid there _may_ be some else--that's how she makes
him do it," she said. And "Now do you think," she pursued, "that I don't
tell you things?"

He turned them over in his young perception and pity, the things she
told him. "Oh, oh, oh!" And then, in the great place, while as, just
spent by the effort of her disclosure, she moved from him again, he
took them all in. "That's the situation that, as you say, may force his
hand."

"It absolutely, I feel, does force it." And the renewal of her appeal
brought her round. "Isn't it too lovely?"

His frank disgust answered. "It's too damnable!"

"And it's you," she quite terribly smiled, "who--by the 'irony of
fate'!--have given him help."

He smote his head in the light of it. "By the Mantovano?"

"By the possible Mantovano--as a substitute for the impossible Sir
Joshua. You've made him aware of a value."

"Ah, but the value's to be fixed!"

"Then Mr. Bender will fix it!"

"Oh, but--as he himself would say--I'll fix Mr. Bender!" Hugh declared.
"And he won't buy a pig in a poke."

This cleared the air while they looked at each other; yet she had
already asked: "What in the world can you do, and how in the world can
you do it?"

Well, he was too excited for decision. "I don't quite see n