The Fighting Chance

"Yes, but nothing I can say alters his conviction that the likeness was intended. You know it was a likeness! And if Mr. Siward had not told me that it was not intended, I should never have believed it to be an accident."

After a prolonged silence Sylvia said, overcarelessly: "I don't quite understand Howard. With me anger lasts but a moment, and then I'm open to overtures for peace … I think Howard's anger lasts."

"It does," said Grace. "He was a muff as a boy--a prig with a prig's memory under all his shallow, showy surface. I'm frank with you; I never could take my cousin either respectfully or seriously, but I've known him to take his own anger so seriously that years after he has visited it upon those who had really wronged him. And he is equipped for retaliation if he chooses. That fortune of his reaches far. … Not that I think him capable of using such a power to satisfy a mere personal dislike. Howard has principles, loads of them. But--the weapon is there."

"Is it true that Mr. Siward is interested in building electric roads?" asked Sylvia curiously.

"I don't know, child. Why?"

"Nothing. I wondered."

"Why?"

"Mr. Mortimer said so."

"Then I suppose he is. I'll ask Kemp if you like. Why? Isn't it all right to build them?"

"I suppose so. Howard is in it somehow. In fact Howard's company is behind Mr. Siward's, I believe."

Grace Ferrall turned and looked at the girl beside her, laughing outright.

"Oh, Howard doesn't do mysterious financial things to nice young men because they draw impudent pictures of him running after his dog--or for any other reason. That, dear, is one of those skilfully developed portions of an artistic plot; and plots exist only in romance. So do villains; and besides, my cousin isn't one. Besides that, if Howard is in that thing, no doubt Kemp and I are too. So your nice young man is in very safe company."

"You draw such silly inferences," said Sylvia coolly; but there was a good deal of colour in her cheeks; and she knew it and pulled her big motor veil across her face, fastening it under her chin. All of which amused Grace Ferrall infinitely until the subtler significance of the girl's mental processes struck her, sobering her own thoughts. Sylvia, too, had grown serious in her preoccupation; and the partie-à-deux terminated a few minutes later in a duet of silence over the tea-cups in the gun-room.

The weather had turned warm and misty; one of those sudden sea-coast changes had greyed the blue in the sky, spreading a fine haze over land and water, effacing the crisp sparkle of the sea, dulling the westering sun.