Page:The Outcry (London, Methuen & Co., 1911).djvu/318

304 demagogue; and my mind's a complete blank on the subject of my having done so."

"So that there only flushes through your conscience," she suggested, "the fact that he has forced your hand?"

Fevered with the sore sense of it his lordship wiped his brow. "He has played me, for spite, his damned impertinent trick!"

She found but after a minute—for it wasn't easy—the right word, or the least wrong, for the situation. "Well, even if he did so diabolically commit you, you still don't want—do you?—to back out."

Resenting the suggestion, which restored all his nobler form, Lord Theign fairly drew himself up. "When did I ever in all my life back out?"

"Never, never in all your life of course!"—she dashed a bucketful at the flare. "And the picture after all!"

"The picture after all"—he took her up in cold grim gallant despair—"has just been pronounced definitely priceless." And then to meet her gaping ignorance: "By Mr. Crimble's latest and apparently greatest adviser, who strongly stamps it a Mantovano and whose practical affidavit I now possess."