k up his figure. "Then won't you begin--as a first
course--with tea after your ride? If the other, that is--for there has
been an ogre before you--has left any."

"Some tea, with pleasure"--he looked all his longing; "though when you
talk of a fellow-feaster I should have supposed that, on such a day
as this especially, you'd find yourselves running a continuous _table
d'hote_."

"Ah, we can't work sports in our gallery and saloon--the banging or
whacking and shoving amusements that are all most people care for;
unless, perhaps," Lady Grace went on, "your own peculiar one, as I
understand you, of playing football with the old benighted traditions
and attributions you everywhere meet: in fact I think you said the old
idiotic superstitions."

Hugh Crimble went more than half-way to meet this description of his
fondest activity; he indeed even beckoned it on. "The names and stories
and styles--the so often vain legend, not to be too invidious--of author
or subject or school?" But he had a drop, no less, as from the sense of a
cause sometimes lost. "Ah, that's a game at which we _all_ can play!"

"Though scarcely," Lady Grace suggested, "at which we all can score."

The words appeared indeed to take meaning from his growing impression
of the place and its charm--of the number of objects, treasures of art,
that pressed for appreciation of their importance. "Certainly," he said,
"no one can ever have scored much on sacred spots of _this_ order--which
express so the grand impunity of their pride, their claims, their
assurance!"

"We've had great luck," she granted--"as I've just been reminded;
but ever since those terrible things you told me in town--about the
tremendous tricks of the whirligig of time and the aesthetic fools'
paradise in which so many of us live--I've gone about with my heart in
my mouth. Who knows that while I talk Mr. Bender mayn't be pulling us to
pieces?"

Hugh Crimble had a shudder of remembrance. "Mr. Bender?"

"The rich American who's going round."

It gave him a sharper shock. "The wretch who bagged Lady Lappington's
Longhi?"

Lady Grace showed surprise. "Is he a wretch?"

Her visitor but asked to be extravagant. "Rather--the scoundrel. He
offered his infernal eight thousand down."

"Oh, I thought you meant he had played some trick!"

"I wish he had--he could then have been collared."

"Well," Lady Grace peacefully smiled, "it's no use his offering _us_
eight thousand--or eighteen or