Page:The time spirit; a romantic tale (IA timespiritromant00snaiiala).pdf/203

 interest her, while all sorts of Radical infamies played Old Harry with the British Constitution?

Lady Wargrave, however, was well inured to this familiar gambit.

"Come, Johnnie," she said tartly, "don't waste time. The matter's too serious. Sarah says you have asked Mrs. Sanderson to stay on."

"Yes, I have asked her to be good enough to reconsider her decision," said his Grace in the slightly forensic manner of the gilded chamber.

"On what grounds, may one ask?"

"I merely put it to her"—he now began to choose each word with a precision that made his sister writhe—"that she was indispensable to the general comfort and well-being of a man as old and gout-ridden as myself."

"Did you, indeed!"

It was a facer. And yet it might have been foreseen. Perhaps the ladies had been a little too elated by their coup de main; or, had they assumed too confidently that at last they had made an end of a shameless intriguer?

Yes, a facer. Charlotte could have slain her brother. He had given away the whole position. It was the act of a traitor. In a voice shaken with anger she proceeded in no measured terms to tell him what she thought of him.

His Grace bore the tirade calmly and with fortitude. He had an instinct for justice—long a source of inconvenience to its possessor!—which now insisted that there was something to be said for the enemy point of view. Still he might not have borne its presentment so patiently had Charlotte not shown her usual cunning. "She did not speak for herself," she was careful to assure him,