pon his lordship.

VII

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 of