ossibly
worse by approaching you again, however discreetly. I've been in the
dark," he pursued, "and feeling that I must leave _you_ there; so that
now--just brutally turning up once more under personal need and at any
cost--I don't know whether I most want or most fear what I may learn
from you."

Lady Grace, listening and watching, appeared to choose between different
ways of meeting this appeal; she had a pacifying, postponing gesture,
marked with a beautiful authority, a sign of the value for her of what
she gave precedence to and which waved off everything else. "Have you
had--first of all--any news yet of Bardi?"

"That I have is what has driven me straight _at_ you again--since I've
shown you before how I turn to you at a crisis. He has come as I hoped
and like a regular good 'un," Hugh was able to state; "I've just met
him at the station, but I pick him up again, at his hotel in Clifford
Street, at five. He stopped, on his way from Dover this morning, to my
extreme exasperation, to 'sample' Canterbury, and I leave him to a
bath and a change and tea. Then swooping down I whirl him round to Bond
Street, where his very first apprehension of the thing (an apprehension,
oh I guarantee you, so quick and clean and fine and wise) will be the
flash-light projected--well," said the young man, to wind up handsomely,
but briefly and reasonably, "over the whole field of our question."

She panted with comprehension. "That of the two portraits being but the
one sitter!"

"That of the two portraits being but the one sitter. With everything so
to the good, more and more, that bangs in, up to the head, the golden
nail of authenticity, and"--he quite glowed through his gloom for
it--"we take our stand in glory on the last Mantovano in the world."

It was a presumption his friend visibly yearned for--but over which,
too, with her eyes away from him, she still distinguished the shadow of
a cloud. "That is if the flash-light comes!"

"That is if it comes indeed, confound it!"--he had to enlarge a little
under the recall of past experience. "So now, at any rate, you see my
tension!"

She looked at him again as with a vision too full for a waste of words.
"While you on your side of course keep well in view Mr. Bender's."

"Yes, while I keep well in view Mr. Bender's; though he doesn't know,
you see, of Bardi's being at hand."

"Still," said the girl, always all lucid for the case, "if the
'flash-light' does presently break-