Page:The Outcry (London, Methuen & Co., 1911).djvu/217

Rh "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?"

She smiled more frankly now, as for a rift in the gloom. "Well, how can we help it if you will be a case?" And then as her tone but visibly darkened his wonder: "What we've set our hearts on is saving the picture."

"What you've set your hearts on, in other words, is working straight against me?"

But she persisted without heat. "What we've set our hearts on is working for England."

"And pray who in the world's 'England,'" he cried in his stupefaction, "unless I am?"

"Dear, dear father," she pleaded, "that's all we want you to be! I mean"—she didn't fear firmly to force it home—"in the real, the right,