as her face seemed to challenge the word: "Why, to let anything—of your best!—ever leave Dedborough. By which I mean really of course leave the country." She turned again on this, and something in her air made him wonder. "I hope you don't feel there is such a danger? I understood from you half an hour ago that it was unthinkable."
"Well, it was, to me, half an hour ago," she said as she came nearer. "But if it has since come up?"
"'If' it has! But has it? In the form of that monster? What Mr. Bender wants is the great Duchess," he recalled.
"And my father won't sell her? No, he won't sell the great Duchess—there I feel safe. But he greatly needs a certain sum of money—or he thinks he does—and I've just had a talk with him."
"In which he has told you that?"
"He has told me nothing," Lady Grace said—"or else told me quite other things. But the more I think of them the more it comes to me that he feels urged or tempted———"
"To despoil and denude these walls?"
