"Dear Lady Barnes, please don't tell me any secrets!" Elsie French implored, and laid a restraining hand on the mother's arm, ready, indeed, to take up her work and fly. But Lady Barnes's chair stood between her and the door, and the occupant of it was substantial.
Laura Barnes hesitated, and in the pause two persons appeared upon the garden path outside, coming towards the open windows of the drawing-room. One was Mrs. Roger Barnes; the other was a man, remarkably tall and slender, with a stoop like that of an overgrown schoolboy, silky dark hair and moustache, and pale gray eyes.
"Dr. Lelius!" said Elsie, in astonishment. "Was Daphne expecting him?"
"Who is Dr. Lelius?" asked Lady Barnes, putting up her eyeglass.
Mrs. French explained that he was a South German art-critic, from Würzburg, with a great reputation. She had already met him at Eton and at Oxford.
"Another expert!" said Lady Barnes with a shrug.
The pair passed the window, absorbed apparently in conversation. Mrs. French escaped. Lady Barnes was left to discontent and solitude.
When Elsie French descended for tea, an hour later, she was aware, from a considerable distance, of people and tumult in the drawing-room. Daphne's soprano voice--agreeable, but making its mark always, like its owner--could be heard running on. The young mistress of the house seemed to be admonishing, instructing, someone. Could it be her mother-in-law?
When Elsie entered, Daphne was walking up and down in excitement.
"One cannot really live with bad pictures because they happen to be one's ancestors! We won't do them any harm, mamma! of course not. There is a room upstairs where they can be stored--most carefully--and anybody who is interested in them can go and look at them. If they had only been left as they were painted!--not by Lely, of course, but by some drapery man in his studio--_passe encore_! they might have been just bearable. But you see some wretched restorer went and daubed them all over a few years ago."
"We went to the best man we could find! We took the best advice!" cried Lady Barnes, sitting stiff and crimson in a deep arm-chair, opposite the luckless row of portraits that Daphne was denouncing.
"I'm sure you did. But then, you see, nobody knew anything at all about it in those days. The restorers were all murderers. Ask Dr. Lelius."