Dacier visibly winced, and Constance immediately said ’Oh! spare us politics, dear uncle.’

Her intercession was without avail, but by contrast with the woman implicated in the horrible article, it was a carol of the seraphs.

‘Come, you can say whether there’s anything in it,’ Dacier’s host pushed him.

‘I should not say it if I could,’ he replied.

The mild sweetness of Miss Asper’s look encouraged him.

He was touched to the quick by hearing her say:  ’You ask for Cabinet secrets, uncle.  All secrets are holy, but secrets of State are under a seal next to divine.’

Next to divine!  She was the mouthpiece of his ruling principle.

’I ‘m not, prying into secrets,’ Quintin persisted; ’all I want to know is, whether there ’s any foundation for that article—­all London’s boiling about it, I can tell you—­or it’s only newspaper’s humbug.’

‘Clearly the oracle for you is the Editor’s office,’ rejoined Dacier.

‘A pretty sort of answer I should get.’

‘It would at least be complimentary.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘The net was cast for you—­and the sight of a fish in it!’

Miss Asper almost laughed.  ‘Have you heard the choir at St. Catherine’s?’ she asked.

Dacier had not.  He repented of his worldliness, and drinking persuasive claret, said he would go to hear it next Sunday.

‘Do,’ she murmured.

‘Well, you seem to be a pair against me,’ her uncle grumbled.  ’Anyhow I think it’s important.  People have been talking for some time, and I don’t want to be taken unawares; I won’t be a yoked ox, mind you.’

‘Have you been sketching lately?’ Dacier asked Miss Asper.

She generally filled a book in the autumn, she said.

‘May I see it?’

‘If you wish.’

They had a short tussle with her uncle and escaped.  He was conducted to a room midway upstairs:  an heiress’s conception of a saintly little room; and more impresive in purity, indeed it was, than a saint’s, with the many crucifixes, gold and silver emblems, velvet prie-Dieu chairs, jewel-clasped sacred volumes:  every invitation to meditate in luxury on an ascetic religiousness.

She depreciated her sketching powers.  ’I am impatient with my imperfections.  I am therefore doomed not to advance.’

‘On the contrary, that is the state guaranteeing ultimate excellence,’ he said, much disposed to drone about it.

She sighed:  ‘I fear not.’

He turned the leaves, comparing her modesty with the performance.  The third of the leaves was a subject instantly recognized by him.  It represented the place he had inherited from Lord Dannisburgh.

He named it.

She smiled:  ’You are good enough to see a likeness?  My aunt and I were passing it last October, and I waited for a day, to sketch.’

‘You have taken it from my favourite point of view.’