Page:The Outcry (London, Methuen & Co., 1911).djvu/286

272 "Why surely if he'll accept your own price!"

Lord Theign thought—he wondered; and then as if fairly amused at himself: "Hanged if I know what is my own price!" After which he went for his hat. "But there's one thing," he remembered as he came back with it: "where's my too, too unnatural daughter?"

"If you mean Grace and really want her I'll send and find out."

"Not now"—he bethought himself. "But does she see that chatterbox?"

"Mr. Crimble? Yes, she sees him."

He kept his eyes on her. "Then how far has it gone?"

Lady Sandgate overcame an embarrassment. "Well, not even yet, I think, so far as they'd like."

"They'd 'like'—heaven save the mark!—to marry?"

"I suspect them of it. What line, if it should come to that," she asked, "would you then take?"

He was perfectly prompt. "The line that for Grace it's simply ignoble."

The force of her deprecation of such language