is a horrid engine in itself--there's the rub!
I dare say"--the young man saw it all--"he has brought his poisonous
cheque."

She gave it her less exasperated wonder. "One has heard of that, but
only in the case of some particularly pushing dealer."

"And Mr. Bender, to do him justice, isn't a particularly pushing
dealer?"

"No," Lady Grace judiciously returned; "I think he's not a dealer at
all, but just what you a moment ago spoke of yourself as being."

He gave a glance at his possibly wild recent past. "A fond true lover?"

"As we _all_ were in our lucky time--when we rum-aged Italy and Spain."

He appeared to recognise this complication--of Bender's voracious
integrity; but only to push it away. "Well, I don't know whether the
best lovers are, or ever were, the best buyers--but I feel to-day that
they're the best keepers."

The breath of his emphasis blew, as her eyes showed, on the girl's
dimmer fire. "It's as if it were suddenly in the air that you've brought
us some light or some help--that you may do something really good for
us."

"Do you mean 'mark down,' as they say at the shops, all your greatest
claims?"

His chord of sensibility had trembled all gratefully into derision, and
not to seem to swagger he had put his possible virtue at its lowest.
This she beautifully showed that she beautifully saw. "I dare say that
if you did even that we should have to take it from you."

"Then it may very well be," he laughed back, "the reason why I feel,
under my delightful, wonderful impression, a bit anxious and nervous and
afraid."

"That shows," she returned, "that you suspect us of horrors hiding from
justice, and that your natural kindness yet shrinks from handing us
over!"

Well, clearly, she might put it as she liked--it all came back to his
being more charmed. "Heaven knows I've wanted a chance at you, but what
should you say if, having then at last just taken you in in your so
apparent perfection, I should feel it the better part of valour simply
to mount my 'bike' again and spin away?"

"I should be sure that at the end of the avenue you'd turn right round
and come back. You'd think again of Mr. Bender."

"Whom I don't, however, you see--if he's prowling off there--in the
least want to meet." Crimble made the point with gaiety. "I don't
know what I mightn't do to him--and yet it's not of my temptation to
violence, after all, that I'm most afraid. It's of the brutal mistake
of one's breaking--