Page:The Outcry (London, Methuen & Co., 1911).djvu/320

306 "Unsigned?"—the exhibition of her design, of her defeat, kept shaking her. "Then it isn't good?"

"It's a Barmecide feast, my dear!"—he had still, her kind friend, his note of grimness and also his penetration of eye. "But who is it writes you colossal cheques?"

"And then leaves them lying about?" Her case was so bad that you would have seen how she felt she must do something—something quite splendid. She recovered herself, she faced the situation with all her bright bravery of expression and aspect; conscious, you might have guessed, that she had never more strikingly embodied, on such lines, the elegant, the beautiful and the true. "Why, who can it have been but poor Breckenridge too?"

"'Breckenridge'—?" Lord Theign had his smart echoes. "What in the world does he owe you money for?"

It took her but an instant more—she performed the great repudiation quite as she might be prepared to sweep, in the Presence impending, her grandest curtsey. "Not, you sweet suspicious thing, for my great-grandmother!" And then as his glare didn't fade: