"Dear papa!" Grace handsomely concurred. Then with a rapid transition: "It would be so jolly for all of us--she'd be so nice to us." "She's that already--in her way," said Lady Agnes conscientiously, having followed the return, quick as it was. "Much good does it do her!" And she reproduced the note of her bitterness of a moment before. "It does her some good that one should look out for her. I do, and I think she knows it," Grace declared. "One can at any rate keep other women off." "Don't meddle--you're very clumsy," was her mother's not particularly sympathetic rejoinder. "There are other women who are beautiful, and there are others who are clever and rich." "Yes, but not all in one: that's what's so nice in Julia. Her fortune would be thrown in; he wouldn't appear to have married her for it." "If he does he won't," said Lady Agnes a trifle obscurely. "Yes, that's what's so charming. And he could do anything then, couldn't he?" "Well, your father had no fortune to speak of." "Yes, but didn't Uncle Percy help him?" "His wife helped him," said Lady Agnes. "Dear mamma!"--the girl was prompt. "There's one thing," she added: "that Mr. Carteret will always help Nick." "What do you mean by 'always'?" "Why whether he marries Julia or not." "Things aren't so easy," Lady Agnes judged. "It will all depend on Nick's behaviour. He can stop it to-morrow." Grace Dormer stared; she evidently thought Mr. Carteret's beneficence a part of the scheme of nature. "How could he stop it?" "By not being serious. It isn't so hard to prevent people giving you money." "Serious?" Grace repeated. "Does he want him to be a prig like Lord Egbert?" "Yes--that's exactly what he wants. And what he'll do for him he'll do for him only if he marries Julia." "Has he told you?" Grace inquired. And then, before her mother could answer, "I'm delighted at that!" she cried. "He hasn't told me, but that's the way things happen." Lady Agnes was less optimistic than her daughter, and such optimism as she cultivated was a thin tissue with the sense of things as they are showing through. "If Nick becomes rich Charles Carteret will make him more so. If he doesn't he won't give him a shilling." "Oh mamma!" Grace demurred. "It's all very well to say that in public life money isn't as necessary as it used to be," her ladyship went on broodingly. "Those who say so don't know anything about it. It's always intensely necessary." Her daughter, visibly affected by the gloom of her manner, felt impelled to evoke as a corrective a more cheerful idea. "I daresay; but there's the fact--isn't there?--that poor papa had so little." "Yes, and there's the fact that it killed him!" These words came out with a strange, quick, little flare of passion. They startled Grace Dormer, who jumped in her place and gasped, "Oh mother!" The next instant, however, she added in a different voice, "Oh Peter!" for, with an air of eagerness, a gentleman was walking up to them.