Lord Theign, when he had gone, revolved¹ — it might have been nervously² — about the place a little, but soon broke ground. “He’ll have told you, I understand, that I’ve promised to speak to you for him. But I understand also that he has found something to say for himself.”

“Yes, we talked — a while since,” the girl said. “At least he did.”

“Then if you listened I hope you listened with a good grace.”

“Oh, he speaks very well — and I’ve never disliked him.”

It pulled her father up. “Is that all — when I think so much of him?”

She seemed to say that she had, to her own mind, been liberal and gone far; but she waited a little. “Do you think very, very much?”

“Surely I’ve made my good opinion clear to you!”

Again she had a pause. “Oh yes, I’ve seen you like him and believe in him — and I’ve found him pleasant and clever.”

“He has never had,” Lord Theign more or less ingeniously explained, “what I call a real show.” But the character under discussion could after all be summed up without searching analysis. “I consider nevertheless that there’s plenty in him.”

It was a moderate claim, to which Lady Grace might assent³. “He strikes me as naturally quick and — well, nice. But I agree with you than he hasn’t had a chance.”

“Then if you can see your way by sympathy and confidence to help him to one I dare say you’ll find your reward.”

For a third time she considered, as if a certain curtness⁴ in her companion’s manner rather hindered, in such a question, than helped. Didn’t he simplify too much, you would have felt her ask, and wasn’t his visible wish for brevity of debate a sign of his uncomfortable and indeed rather irritated sense of his not making a figure in it? “Do you desire it very particularly?” was, however, all she at last brought out.

“I should like it exceedingly — if you act from conviction. Then of course only; but of one thing I’m myself convinced — of what he thinks of yourself and feels for you.”

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