e of proportion. If you
make this row when I sell a picture, what will be left to you when I
forge a cheque?"

"If you had arrived at the necessity of forging a cheque," she answered,
"I should then resign myself to that of your selling a picture."

"But not short of that!"

"Not short of that. Not one of ours."

"But I couldn't," said his lordship with his best and coldest amusement,
"sell one of somebody else's!"

She was, however, not disconcerted. "Other people do other things--they
appear to have done them, and to be doing them, all about us. But _we_
have been so decently different--always and ever. We've never done
anything disloyal."

"'Disloyal'?"--he was more largely amazed and even interested now.

Lady Grace stuck to her word. "That's what it seems to _me!_"

"It seems to you"--and his sarcasm here was easy--"more disloyal to sell
a picture than to buy one? Because we didn't paint 'em all ourselves,
you know!"

She threw up impatient hands. "I don't ask you either to paint or to
buy----!"

"Oh, _that's_ a mercy!" he interrupted, riding his irony hard; "and
I'm glad to hear you at least let me off _such_ efforts! However, if it
strikes you as gracefully filial to apply to your father's conduct so
invidious a word," he went on less scathingly, "you must take
from him, in your turn, his quite other view of what makes
disloyalty--understanding distinctly, by the same token, that he enjoins
on you not to give an odious illustration of it, while he's away, by
discussing and deploring with any _one_ of your extraordinary
friends any aspect or feature whatever of his walk and conversation.
That--pressed as I am for time," he went on with a glance at his watch
while she remained silent--"is the main sense of what I have to say to
you; so that I count on your perfect conformity. When you have told me
that I _may_ so count"--and casting about for his hat he espied it and
went to take it up--"I shall more cordially bid you good-bye."

His daughter looked as if she had been for some time expecting the law
thus imposed upon her--had been seeing where he must come out; but
in spite of this preparation she made him wait for his reply in such
tension as he had himself created. "To Kitty I've practically said
nothing--and she herself can tell you why: I've in fact scarcely seen
her this fortnight. Putting aside then Amy Sandgate, the only person to
whom I've spoken--of your 'sacrifice,' as I suppose you'll let m