e
call it?--is Mr. Hugh Crimble, whom you talk of as my 'confederate' at
Dedborough."

Lord Theign recovered the name with relief. "Mr. Hugh Crimble--that's
it!--whom you so amazingly caused to be present, and apparently invited
to be active, at a business that so little concerned him."

"He certainly took upon himself to be interested, as I had hoped he
would. But it was because I had taken upon _my_ self--"

"To act, yes," Lord Theign broke in, "with the grossest want of
delicacy! Well, it's from that exactly that you'll now forbear;
and 'interested' as he may be--for which I'm deucedly obliged to
him!--you'll not speak to Mr. Crimble again."

"Never again?"--the girl put it as for full certitude.

"Never of the question that I thus exclude. You may chatter your fill,"
said his lordship curtly, "about any others."

"Why, the particular question you forbid," Grace returned with great
force, but as if saying something very reasonable--"that question is
_the_ question we care about: it's our very ground of conversation."

"Then," her father decreed, "your conversation will please to _dispense_
with a ground; or you'll perhaps, better still--if that's the only
way!--dispense with your conversation."

Lady Grace took a moment as if to examine this more closely. "You
require of me not to communicate with Mr. Crimble at all?"

"Most assuredly I require it--since it's to that you insist on
reducing me." He didn't look reduced, the master of Dedborough, as he
spoke--which was doubtless precisely because he held his head so high
to affirm what he suffered. "Is it so essential to your comfort," he
demanded, "to hear him, or to make him, abuse me?"

"'Abusing' you, father dear, has nothing whatever to do with it!"--his
daughter had fairly lapsed, with a despairing gesture, to the tenderness
involved in her compassion for his perversity. "We look at the thing in
a much larger way," she pursued, not heeding that she drew from him
a sound of scorn for her "larger." "It's of our Treasure itself we
talk--and of what can be _done_ in such cases; though with a close
application, I admit, to the case that you embody."

"Ah," Lord Theign asked as with absurd curiosity, "I embody a case?"

"Wonderfully, father--as you do everything; and it's the fact of its
being exceptional," she explained, "that makes it so difficult to deal
with."

His lordship had a gape for it. "'To deal with'? You're undertaking to
'deal' with me?"