ler light "You _know_ my Breckenridge?--who I hoped
was coming for me!"

Lord John as freely, but more gaily, wondered. "Had he told you so?"

She held out, opened, the telegram she had kept folded in her hand since
her entrance. "He has sent me that--which, delivered to me ten minutes
ago out there, has brought me in to receive him."

The young man read out this missive. "'Failing to find you in Bruton
Street, start in pursuit and hope to overtake you about four.'" It did
involve an ambiguity. "Why, he has been engaged these three days
to coincide with myself, and not to fail of him has been part of my
business."

Lady Sandgate, in her demonstrative way, appealed to the general rich
scene. "Then why does he say it's me he's pursuing?"

He seemed to recognise promptly enough in her the sense of a menaced
monopoly. "My dear lady, he's pursuing expensive works of art."

"By which you imply that I'm one?" She might have been wound up by her
disappointment to almost any irony.

"I imply--or rather I affirm--that every handsome woman is! But what he
arranged with me about," Lord John explained, "was that he should
see the Dedborough pictures in general and the great Sir Joshua in
particular--of which he had heard so much and to which I've been thus
glad to assist him."

This news, however, with its lively interest, but deepened the
listener's mystification. "Then why--this whole week that I've been in
the house--hasn't our good friend here mentioned to me his coming?"

"Because our good friend here has had no reason"--Lord John could treat
it now as simple enough. "Good as he is in all ways, he's so best of
all about showing the house and its contents that I haven't even thought
necessary to write him that I'm introducing Breckenridge."

"I should have been happy to introduce him," Lady Sandgate just
quavered--"if I had at all known he wanted it."

Her companion weighed the difference between them and appeared to
pronounce it a trifle he didn't care a fig for. "I surrender you that
privilege then--of presenting him to his host--if I've seemed to you
to snatch it from you." To which Lord John added, as with liberality
unrestricted, "But I've been taking him about to see what's worth
while--as only last week to Lady Lappington's Longhi."

This revelation, though so casual in its form, fairly drew from Lady
Sandgate, as she took it in, an interrogative wail. "Her Longhi?"

"Why, don't you know her great Venetian