Page:The Outcry (London, Methuen & Co., 1911).djvu/247

Rh animal in the line of its trajectory. That's exactly," he laughed, "where we are!"

She cast about as intelligently to note the place. "Your great idea, you mean, has so worked—with the uproar truly as loud as it has seemed to come to us here?"

"All beyond my wildest hope," Hugh returned; "since the sight of the picture, flocked to every day by thousands, so beautifully tells. That we must at any cost keep it, that the nation must, and hang on to it tight, is the cry that fills the air—to the tune of ten letters a day in the Papers, with every three days a gorgeous leader; to say nothing of more and more passionate talk all over the place, some of it awfully wild, but all of it wind in our sails."

"I suppose it was that wind then that blew me round there to see the thing in its new light," Lady Grace said. "But I couldn't stay—for tears!"

"Ah," Hugh insisted on his side for comfort, "we'll crow loudest yet! And don't meanwhile, just don't, those splendid strange eyes of the fellow seem consciously to plead? The women, bless them, adore him, cling