Page:The Outcry (London, Methuen & Co., 1911).djvu/262

248 eagerness and tension as soon as the door had closed behind him. "What on earth then do you suppose he has come back to do—?" To which he added while his hostess's gesture impatiently disclaimed conjecture: "Because when a fellow really finds himself the centre of a cyclone!"

"Isn't it just at the centre," she interrupted, "that you keep remarkably still, and only in the suburbs that you feel the rage? I count on dear Theign's doing nothing in the least foolish!"

"Ah, but he can't have chucked everything for nothing," Lord John sharply returned; "and wherever you place him in the rumpus he can't but meet somehow, hang it, such an assault on his character as a great nobleman and good citizen."

"It's his luck to have become with the public of the newspapers the scapegoat-in-chief: for the sins, so-called, of a lot of people!" Lady Sandgate inconclusively sighed.

"Yes," Lord John concluded for her, "the mercenary millions on whose traffic in their trumpery values—when they're so lucky as to have any!—this isn't a patch!"