Page:The Outcry (London, Methuen & Co., 1911).djvu/280

266 offer; but that, that done, you shall leave him free"

Lady Sandgate took it up straight, rounding it off, as their companion only waited. "Leave him free to talk about the sum offered and the sum taken as practically one and the same?"

"Ah, you know," Lord John discriminated, "he doesn't 'talk' so much himself—there's really nothing blatant or crude about poor Bender. It's the rate at which—by the very way he's 'fixed': an awful way indeed, I grant you!—a perfect army of reporter-wretches, close at his heels, are always talking for him and of him."

Lord Theign spoke hereupon at last with the air as of an impulse that had been slowly gathering force. "You talk for him, my dear chap, pretty well. You urge his case, my honour, quite as if you were assured of a commission on the job—on a fine ascending scale! Has he put you up to that proposition, eh? Do you get a handsome percentage and are you to make a good thing of it?"

The young man coloured under this stinging pleasantry—whether from a good conscience affronted or from a bad one made worse; but