COVERING END (continued 2)

The young man presently changed his posture. “You’re a widow?”

Nothing was wanting to the simplicity of her quiet assent. “A very lone woman.” Her face, for a moment, had the vision of a long distance. “My loneliness is great enough to want something big to hold it—and my taste good enough to want something beautiful. You see, I had your picture.”

Yule’s innocence made a movement. “Mine?”

Her smile reassured him; she nodded toward the main entrance. “A water colour I chanced on in Boston.”

“In Boston?”

She stared. “Haven’t you heard of Boston either?”

“Yes—but what has Boston heard of me?”

“It wasn’t ‘you,’ unfortunately—it was your divine south front. The drawing struck me so that I got you up—in the books.”

He appeared, however, rather comically, but half to make it out, or to gather at any rate that there was even more of it than he feared. “Are we in the books?”

“Did you never discover it?” Before his blankness, the dim apprehension in his fine amused and troubled face of how much there was of it, her frank, gay concern for him sprang again to the front. “Where in heaven’s name, Captain Yule, have you come over from?”

He looked at her very kindly, but as if scarce expecting her to follow. “The East End of London.”

She had followed perfectly, he saw the next instant, but she had by no means equally accepted. “What were you doing there?”

He could only put it, though a little over-consciously, very simply. “Working, you see. When I left the army—it was much too slow, unless one was personally a whirlwind of war—I began to make out that, for a fighting man——”

“There’s always,” she took him up, “somebody or other to go for?”

He considered her, while he smoked, with more confidence; as if she might after all understand. “The enemy, yes—everywhere in force. I went for him: misery and ignorance and vice—injustice and privilege and wrong. Such as you see me——”

“You’re a rabid reformer?”—she understood beautifully. “I wish we had you at Missoura Top!”

He literally, for a moment, in the light of her beauty and familiarity, appeared to measure his possible use there; then, looking round him again, announced with a sigh that, predicament for predicament, his own would do. “I fear my work is nearer home. I hope,” he continued, “since you’re so good as to seem to care, to perform a part of that work in the next House of Commons. My electors have wanted me——”

“And you’ve wanted them,” she lucidly put in, “and that has been why you couldn’t come down.”

“Yes, for all this last time. And before that, from my childhood up, there was another reason.” He took a few steps away and brought it out as rather a shabby one. “A family feud.”

She proved to be quite delighted with it. “Oh, I’m so glad—I hoped I’d strike a ‘feud’! That rounds it off, and spices it up, and, for the heartbreak with which I take leave of you, just neatly completes the fracture!” Her reference to her going seemed suddenly, on this, to bring her back to a sense of proportion and propriety, and she glanced about once more for some wrap or reticule. This, in turn, however, was another recall. “Must I really wait—to go up?”

He had watched her movement, had changed colour, had shifted his place, had tossed away, plainly unwitting, a cigarette but half smoked; and now he stood in her path to the staircase as if, still unsatisfied, he abruptly sought a way to turn the tables. “Only till you tell me this: if you absolutely meant, awhile ago, that this old thing is so precious.”

She met his doubt with amazement and his density with compassion. “Do you literally need I should say it? Can you stand here and not feel it?” If he had the misfortune of bandaged eyes, she could at least rejoice in her own vision, which grew intenser with her having to speak for it. She spoke as with a new rush of her impression. “It’s a place to love——” Yet to say the whole thing was not easy.

“To love——?” he impatiently insisted.

“Well, as you’d love a person!” If that was saying the whole thing, saying the whole thing could only be to go. A sound from the “party up” came down at that moment, and she took it so clearly as a call that, for a sign of separation, she passed straight to the stairs. “Good-bye!”

The young man let her reach the foot, but then, though the greatest width of the hall now divided them, spoke, anxiously and nervously, as if the point she had just made brought them still more together. “I think I ‘feel’ it, you know; but it’s simply you—your presence, as I may say, and the remarkable way you put it—that make me. I’m afraid that in your absence——” He struck a match to smoke again.

It gave her time apparently to make out something to pause for. “In my absence?”

He lit his cigarette. “I may come back——”

“Come back?” she took him almost sharply up. “I should like to see you not!”

He smoked a moment. “I mean to my old idea——”

She had quite turned round on him now. “Your old idea——?”

He faced her over the width still between them. “Well—that one could give it up.”

Her stare, at this, fairly filled the space. “Give up Covering? How in the world—or why?”

“Because I can’t afford to keep it.”

It brought her straight back, but only half-way: she pulled up short as at a flash. “Can’t you let it?”

Again he smoked before answering. “Let it to you?”

She gave a laugh, and her laugh brought her nearer. “I’d take it in a minute!”

Clement Yule remained grave. “I shouldn’t have the face to charge you a rent that would make it worth one’s while, and I think even you, dear lady”—his voice just trembled as he risked that address—“wouldn’t have the face to offer me one.” He paused, but something in his aspect and manner checked in her now any impulse to read his meaning too soon. “My lovely inheritance is Dead Sea fruit. It’s mortgaged for all it’s worth and I haven’t the means to pay the interest. If by a miracle I could scrape the money together, it would leave me without a penny to live on.” He puffed his cigarette profusely. “So if I find the old home at last—I lose it by the same luck!”

Mrs. Gracedew had hung upon his words, and she seemed still to wait, in visible horror, for something that would improve on them. But when she had to take them for his last, “I never heard of anything so awful!” she broke out. “Do you mean to say you can’t arrange——?”

“Oh, yes,” he promptly replied, “an arrangement—if that be the name to give it—has been definitely proposed to me.”

“What’s the matter, then?”—she had dropped into relief. “For heaven’s sake, you poor thing, definitely accept it!”

He laughed, though with little joy, at her sweet simplifications. “I’ve made up my mind in the last quarter of an hour that I can’t. It’s such a peculiar case.”

Mrs. Gracedew frankly wondered; her bias was clearly sceptical. “How peculiar——?”

He found the measure difficult to give. “Well—more peculiar than most cases.”

Still she was not satisfied. “More peculiar than mine?”

“Than yours?”—Clement Yule knew nothing about that.

Something, at this, in his tone, his face—it might have been his “British” density—seemed to pull her up. “I forgot—you don’t know mine. No matter. What is yours?”

He took a few steps in thought. “Well, the fact that I’m asked to change.”

“To change what?”

He wondered how he could put it; then at last, on his own side, simplified. “My attitude.”

“Is that all?”—she was relieved again. “Well, you’re not a statue.”

“No, I’m not a statue; but on the other hand, don’t you see? I’m not a windmill.” There was good-humour, none the less, in his rigour. “The mortgages I speak of have all found their way, like gregarious silly sheep, into the hands of one person—a devouring wolf, a very rich, a very sharp man of money. He holds me in this manner at his mercy. He consents to make things comfortable for me, but he requires that, in return, I shall do something for him that—don’t you know?—rather sticks in my crop.”

It appeared on this light showing to stick for a moment even in Mrs. Gracedew’s. “Do you mean something wrong?”

He had not a moment’s hesitation. “Exceedingly so!”

She turned it over as if pricing a Greek Aldus. “Anything immoral?”

“Yes—I may literally call it immoral.”

She courted, however, frankly enough, the strict truth. “Too bad to tell?”

He indulged in another pensive fidget, then left her to judge. “He wants me to give up——” Yet again he faltered.

“To give up what?” What could it be, she appeared to ask, that was barely nameable?

He quite blushed to her indeed as he came to the point. “My fundamental views.”

She was disappointed—she had waited for more. “Nothing but them?”

He met her with astonishment. “Surely they’re quite enough, when one has unfortunately”—he rather ruefully smiled—“so very many!”

She laughed aloud; this was frankly so odd a plea. “Well, I’ve a neat collection too, but I’d ‘swap,’ as they say in the West, the whole set——!” She looked about the hall for something of equivalent price; after which she pointed, as it caught her eye, to the great cave of the fireplace. “I’d take that set!”

The young man scarcely followed. “The fire-irons?”

“For the whole fundamental lot!” She gazed with real yearning at the antique group. “They’re three hundred years old. Do you mean to tell me your wretched ‘views’——?”

“Have anything like that age? No, thank God,” Clement Yule laughed, “my views—wretched as you please!—are quite in their prime! They’re a hungry little family that has got to be fed. They keep me awake at night.”

“Then you must make up your sleep!” Her impatience grew with her interest. “Listen to me!”

“That would scarce be the way!” he returned. But he added more sincerely: “You must surely see a fellow can’t chuck his politics.”

“‘Chuck’ them——?”

“Well—sacrifice them.”

“I’d sacrifice mine,” she cried, “for that old fire-back with your arms!” He glanced at the object in question, but with such a want of intelligence that she visibly resented it. “See how it has stood!”

“See how I’ve stood!” he answered with spirit. “I’ve glowed with a hotter fire than anything in any chimney, and the warmth and light I diffuse have attracted no little attention. How can I consent to reduce them to the state of that desolate hearth?”

His companion, freshly struck with the fine details of the desolation, had walked over to the chimney-corner, where, lost in her deeper impression, she lingered and observed. At last she turned away with her impatience controlled. “It’s magnificent!”

“The fire-back?”

“Everything—everywhere. I don’t understand your haggling.”

He hesitated. “That’s because you’re ignorant.” Then seeing in the light of her eye that he had applied to her the word in the language she least liked, he hastened to attenuate. “I mean of what’s behind my reserves.”

She was silent in a way that made their talk more of a discussion than if she had spoken. “What is behind them?” she presently asked.

“Why, my whole political history. Everything I’ve said, everything I’ve done. My scorching addresses and letters, reproduced in all the papers. I needn’t go into details, but I’m a pure, passionate, pledged Radical.”

Mrs. Gracedew looked him full in the face. “Well, what if you are?”

He broke into mirth at her tone. “Simply this—that I can’t therefore, from one day to the other, pop up at Gossage in the purple pomp of the opposite camp. There’s a want of transition. It may be timid of me—it may be abject. But I can’t.”

If she was not yet prepared to contest she was still less prepared to surrender it, and she confined herself for the instant to smoothing down with her foot the corner of an old rug. “Have you thought very much about it?”

He was vague. “About what?”

“About what Mr. Prodmore wants you to do.”

He flushed up. “Oh, then, you know it’s he?”

“I’m not,” she said, still gravely enough, “of an intelligence absolutely infantile.”

“You’re the cleverest Tory I’ve ever met!” he laughed. “I didn’t mean to mention my friend’s name, but since you’ve done so——!” He gave up with a shrug his scruple.

Oh, she had already cleared the ground of it! “It’s he who’s the devouring wolf? It’s he who holds your mortgages?”

The very lucidity of her interest just checked his assent. “He holds plenty of others, and he treats me very handsomely.”

She showed of a sudden an inconsequent face. “Do you call that handsome—such a condition?”

He shed surprise. “Why, I thought it was just the condition you could meet.”

She measured her inconsistency, but was not abashed. “We’re not talking of what I can meet.” Yet she found also a relief in dropping the point. “Why doesn’t he stand himself?”

“Well, like other devouring wolves, he’s not personally adored.”

“Not even,” she asked, “when he offers such liberal terms?”

Clement Yule had to explain. “I dare say he doesn’t offer them to everyone.”

“Only to you?”—at this she quite sprang. “You are personally adored; you will be still more if you stand; and that, you poor lamb, is why he wants you!”

The young man, obviously pleased to find her after all more at one with him, accepted gracefully enough the burden her sympathy imposed. “I’m the bearer of my name, I’m the representative of my family; and to my family and my name—since you’ve led me to it—this countryside has been for generations indulgently attached.”

She listened to him with a sentiment in her face that showed how now, at last, she felt herself deal with the lawful heir. She seemed to perceive it with a kind of passion. “You do of course what you will with the countryside!”

“Yes”—he went with her—“if we do it as genuine Yules. I’m obliged of course to grant you that your genuine Yule’s a Tory of Tories. It’s Mr. Prodmore’s belief that I should carry Gossage in that character, but in that character only. They won’t look at me in any other.”

It might have taxed a spectator to say in what character Mrs. Gracedew, on this, for a little, considered him. “Don’t be too sure of people’s not looking at you!”

He blushed again, but he laughed. “We must leave out my personal beauty.”

“We can’t!” she replied with decision. “Don’t we take in Mr. Prodmore’s?”

Captain Yule was not prepared. “You call him beautiful?”

“Hideous.” She settled it; then pursued her investigation. “What’s the extraordinary interest that he attaches——?”

“To the return of a Tory?” Here the young man was prepared. “Oh, his desire is born of his fear—his terror on behalf of Property, which he sees, somehow, with an intensely Personal, with a quite colossal ‘P.’ He has a great deal of that article, and very little of anything else.”

Mrs. Gracedew, accepting provisionally his demonstration, had one of her friendly recalls. “Do you call that nice daughter ‘very little’?”

The young man looked quite at a loss. “Is she very big? I really didn’t notice her—and moreover she’s just a part of the Property. He thinks things are going too far.”

She sat straight down on a stiff chair; on which, with high distinctness: “Well, they are!”

He stood before her in the discomposure of her again thus appearing to fail him. “Aren’t you then a lover of justice?”

“A passionate one!” She sat there as upright as if she held the scales. “Where’s the justice of your losing this house?” Generous as well as strenuous, all her fairness thrown out by her dark old high-backed seat, she put it to him as from the judicial bench. “To keep Covering, you must carry Gossage!”

The odd face he made at it might have betrayed a man dazzled. “As a renegade?”

“As a genuine Yule. What business have you to be anything else?” She had already arranged it all. “You must close with Mr. Prodmore—you must stand in the Tory interest.” She hung fire a moment; then as she got up: “If you will, I’ll conduct your canvass!”

He stared at the distracting picture. “That puts the temptation high!”

But she brushed the mere picture away. “Ah, don’t look at me as if I were the temptation! Look at this sweet old human home, and feel all its gathered memories. Do you want to know what they do to me?” She took the survey herself again, as if to be really sure. “They speak to me for Mr. Prodmore.”

He followed with a systematic docility the direction of her eyes, but as if with the result only of its again coming home to him that there was no accounting for what things might do. “Well, there are others than these, you know,” he good-naturedly pleaded—“things for which I’ve spoken, repeatedly and loudly, to others than you.” The very manner of his speaking on such occasions appeared, for that matter, now to come back to him. “One’s ‘human home’ is all very well, but the rest of one’s humanity is better!” She gave, at this, a droll soft wail; she turned impatiently away. “I see you’re disgusted with me, and I’m sorry; but one must take one’s self as circumstances and experience have made one, and it’s not my fault, don’t you know? if they’ve made me a very modern man. I see something else in the world than the beauty of old show-houses and the glory of old show-families. There are thousands of people in England who can show no houses at all, and I don’t feel it utterly shameful to share their poor fate!”

She had moved away with impatience, and it was the advantage of this for her that the back she turned prevented him from seeing how intently she listened. She seemed to continue to listen even after he had stopped; but if that gave him a sense of success, he might have been checked by the way she at last turned round with a sad and beautiful headshake. “We share the poor fate of humanity whatever we do, and we do something to help and console when we’ve something precious to show. What on earth is more precious than what the ages have slowly wrought? They’ve trusted us, in such a case, to keep it—to do something, in our turn, for them.” She shone out at him as if her contention had the evidence of the noonday sun, and yet in her generosity she superabounded and explained. “It’s such a virtue, in anything, to have lasted; it’s such an honour, for anything, to have been spared. To all strugglers from the wreck of time hold out a pitying hand!”

Yule, on this argument,—of a strain which even a good experience of debate could scarce have prepared him to meet,—had not a congruous rejoinder absolutely pat, and his hesitation unfortunately gave him time to see how soon his companion made out that what had touched him most in it was her particular air in presenting it. She would manifestly have preferred he should have been floored by her mere moral reach; yet he was aware that his own made no great show as he took refuge in general pleasantry. “What a plea for looking backward, dear lady, to come from Missoura Top!”

“We’re making a Past at Missoura Top as fast as ever we can, and I should like to see you lay your hand on an hour of the one we’ve made! It’s a tight fit, as yet, I grant,” she said, “and that’s just why I like, in yours, to find room, don’t you see? to turn round. You’re in it, over here, and you can’t get out; so just make the best of that and treat the thing as part of the fun!”

“The whole of the fun, to me,” the young man replied, “is in hearing you defend it! It’s like your defending hereditary gout or chronic rheumatism and sore throat—the things I feel aching in every old bone of these walls and groaning in every old draught that, I’m sure, has for centuries blown through them.”

Mrs. Gracedew looked as if no woman could be shaken who was so prepared to be just all round. “If there be aches—there may be—you’re here to soothe them, and if there be draughts—there must be!—you’re here to stop them up. And do you know what I’m here for? If I’ve come so far and so straight, I’ve almost wondered myself. I’ve felt with a kind of passion—but now I see why I’ve felt.” She moved about the hall with the excitement of this perception, and, separated from him at last by a distance across which he followed her discovery with a visible suspense, she brought out the news. “I’m here for an act of salvation—I’m here to avert a sacrifice!”

So they stood a little, with more, for the minute, passing between them than either really could say. She might have flung down a glove that he decided on the whole, passing his hand over his head as the seat of some confusion, not to pick up. Again, but flushed as well as smiling, he sought the easiest cover. “You’re here, I think, madam, to be a memory for all my future!”

Well, she was willing, she showed as she came nearer, to take it, at the worst, for that. “You’ll be one for mine, if I can see you by that hearth. Why do you make such a fuss about changing your politics? If you’d come to Missoura Top, you’d change them quick enough!” Then, as she saw further and struck harder, her eyes grew deep, her face even seemed to pale, and she paused, splendid and serious, with the force of her plea. “What do politics amount to, compared with religions? Parties and programmes come and go, but a duty like this abides. There’s nothing you can break with”—she pressed him closer, ringing out—“that would be like breaking here. The very words are violent and ugly—as much a sacrilege as if you had been trusted with the key of the temple. This is the temple—don’t profane it! Keep up the old altar kindly—you can’t set up a new one as good. You must have beauty in your life, don’t you see?—that’s the only way to make sure of it for the lives of others. Keep leaving it to them, to all the poor others,” she went on with her bright irony, “and heaven only knows what will become of it! Does it take one of us to feel that?—to preach you the truth? Then it’s good, Captain Yule, we come right over—just to see, you know, what you may happen to be about. We know,” she went on while her sense of proportion seemed to play into her sense of humour, “what we haven’t got, worse luck; so that if you’ve happily got it you’ve got it also for us. You’ve got it in trust, you see, and oh! we have an eye on you. You’ve had it so for me, all these dear days that I’ve been drinking it in, that, to be grateful, I’ve wanted regularly to do something.” With which, as if in the rich confidence of having convinced him, she came so near as almost to touch him. “Tell me now I shall have done it—I shall have kept you at your post!”

If he moved, on this, immediately further, it was with the oddest air of seeking rather to study her remarks at his ease than to express an independence of them. He kept, to this end, his face averted—he was so completely now in intelligent possession of her own. The sacrifice in question carried him even to the door of the court, where he once more stood so long engaged that the persistent presentation of his back might at last have suggested either a confession or a request.

Mrs. Gracedew, meanwhile, a little spent with her sincerity, seated herself again in the great chair, and if she sought, visibly enough, to read a meaning into his movement, she had as little triumph for one possible view of it as she had resentment for the other. The possibility that he yielded left her after all as vague in respect to a next step as the possibility that he merely wished to get rid of her. The moments elapsed without her abdicating; and indeed when he finally turned round his expression was an equal check to any power to feel she might have won. “You have,” he queerly smiled at her, “a standpoint quite your own and a style of eloquence that the few scraps of parliamentary training I’ve picked up don’t seem at all to fit me to deal with. Of course I don’t pretend, you know, that I don’t care for Covering.”

That, at all events, she could be glad to hear, if only perhaps for the tone in it that was so almost comically ingenuous. But her relief was reasonable and her exultation temperate. “You haven’t even seen it yet.” She risked, however, a laugh. “Aren’t you a bit afraid?”

He took a minute to reply, then replied—as if to make it up—with a grand collapse. “Yes; awfully. But if I am,” he hastened in decency to add, “it isn’t only Covering that makes me.”

This left his friend apparently at a loss. “What else is it?”

“Everything. But it doesn’t in the least matter,” he loosely pursued. “You may be quite correct. When we talk of the house your voice comes to me somehow as the wind in its old chimneys.”

Her amusement distinctly revived. “I hope you don’t mean I roar!”

He blushed again; there was no doubt he was confused. “No—nor yet perhaps that you whistle! I don’t believe the wind does either, here. It only whispers,” he sought gracefully to explain; “and it sighs——”

“And I hope,” she broke in, “that it sometimes laughs!”

The sound she gave only made him, as he looked at her, more serious. “Whatever it does, it’s all right.”

“All right?”—they were sufficiently together again for her to lay her hand straight on his arm. “Then you promise?”

“Promise what?”

He had turned as pale as if she hurt him, and she took her hand away. “To meet Mr. Prodmore.”

“Oh, dear, no; not yet!”—he quite recovered himself. “I must wait—I must think.”

She looked disappointed, and there was a momentary silence. “When have you to answer him?”

“Oh, he gives me time!” Clement Yule spoke very much as he might have said, “Oh, in two minutes!”

“I wouldn’t give you time,” Mrs. Gracedew cried with force—“I’d give you a shaking! For God’s sake, at any rate”—and she really tried to push him off—“go upstairs!”

“And literally find the dreadful man?” This was so little his personal idea that, distinctly dodging her pressure, he had already reached the safe quarter.

But it befell that at the same moment she saw Cora reappear on the upper landing—a circumstance that promised her a still better conclusion. “He’s coming down!”

Cora, in spite of this announcement, came down boldly enough without him and made directly for Mrs. Gracedew, to whom her eyes had attached themselves with an undeviating glare. Her plain purpose of treating this lady as an isolated presence allowed their companion perfect freedom to consider her arrival with sharp alarm. His disconcerted stare seemed for a moment to balance; it wandered, gave a wild glance at the open door, then searched the ascent of the staircase, in which, apparently, it now found a coercion. “I’ll go up!” he gasped; and he took three steps at a time.

V

The girl threw herself, in her flushed eagerness, straight upon the wonderful lady. “I’ve come back to you—I want to speak to you!” The need had been a rapid growth, but it was clearly immense. “May I confide in you?”

Her instant overflow left Mrs. Gracedew both astonished and amused. “You too?” she laughed. “Why it is good we come over!”

“It is, indeed!” Cora gratefully echoed. “You were so very kind to me and seemed to think me so curious.”

The mirth of her friend redoubled. “Well, I loved you for it, and it was nothing moreover to what you thought me!”

Miss Prodmore found, for this, no denial—she only presented her frank high colour. “I loved you. But I’m the worst!” she generously added. “And I’m solitary.”

“Ah, so am I!” Mrs. Gracedew declared with gaiety, but with emphasis. “A very queer thing always is solitary! But, since we have that link, by all means confide.”

“Well, I was met here by tremendous news.” Cora produced it with a purple glow. “He wants me to marry him!”

Mrs. Gracedew looked amiably receptive, but as if she failed as yet to follow. “‘He’ wants you?”

“Papa, of course. He has settled it!”

Mrs. Gracedew was still vague. “Settled what?”

“Why, the whole question. That I must take him.”

Mrs. Gracedew seemed to frown at her own scattered wits. “But, my dear, take whom?”

The girl looked surprised at this lapse of her powers. “Why, Captain Yule, who just went up.”

“Oh!” said Mrs. Gracedew with a full stare. “Oh!” she repeated, looking straight away.

“I thought you would know,” Cora gently explained.

Her friend’s eyes, with a kinder light now, came back to her. “I didn’t know.” Mrs. Gracedew looked, in truth, as if that had been sufficiently odd, and seemed also to wonder at two or three things more. It all, however, broke quickly into a question. “Has Captain Yule asked you?”

“No, but he will”—Cora was clear as a bell. “He’ll do it to keep the house. It’s mortgaged to papa, and Captain Yule buys it back.”

Her friend had an illumination that was rapid for the way it spread. “By marrying you?” she quavered.

Cora, under further parental instruction, had plainly mastered the subject. “By giving me his name and his position. They’re awfully great, and they’re the price, don’t you see?” she modestly mentioned. “My price. Papa’s price. Papa wants them.”

Mrs. Gracedew had caught hold; yet there were places where her grasp was weak, and she had, strikingly, begun again to reflect. “But his name and his position, great as they may be, are his dreadful politics!”

Cora threw herself with energy into this advance. “You know about his dreadful politics? He’s to change them,” she recited, “to get me. And if he gets me——”

“He keeps the house?”—Mrs. Gracedew snatched it up.

Cora continued to show her schooling. “I go with it—he’s to have us both. But only,” she admonishingly added, “if he changes. The question is—will he change?”

Mrs. Gracedew appeared profoundly to entertain it. “I see. Will he change?”

Cora’s consideration of it went even further. “Has he changed?”

It went—and the effect was odd—a little too far for her companion, in whom, just discernibly, it had touched the spring of impatience. “My dear child, how in the world should I know?”

But Cora knew exactly how anyone would know. “He hasn’t seemed to care enough for the house. Does he care?”

Mrs. Gracedew moved away, passed over to the fireplace, and stood a moment looking at the old armorial fire-back she had praised to its master—yet not, it must be added, as if she particularly saw it. Then as she faced about: “You had better ask him!”

They stood thus confronted, with the fine old interval between them, and the girl’s air was for a moment that of considering such a course. “If he does care,” she said at last, “he’ll propose.”

Mrs. Gracedew, from where she stood in relation to the stairs, saw at this point the subject of their colloquy restored to view: Captain Yule was just upon them—he had turned the upper landing. The sight of him forced from her in a flash an ejaculation that she tried, however, to keep private—“He does care!” She passed swiftly, before he reached them, back to the girl and, in a quick whisper, but with full conviction, let her have it: “He’ll propose!”

Her movement had made her friend aware, and the young man, hurrying down, was now in the hall. Cora, at his hurry, looked dismay—“Then I fly!” With which, casting about for a direction, she reached the door to the court.

Captain Yule, however, at this result of his return, expressed instant regret. “I drive Miss Prodmore away!”

Mrs. Gracedew, more quickly still, eased off the situation. “It’s all right!” She had embraced both parties with a smile, but it was most liberal now for Cora. “Do you mind, one moment?”—it conveyed, unmistakeably, a full intelligence and a fine explanation. “I’ve something to say to Captain Yule.”

Cora stood in the doorway, robust against the garden-light, and looking from one to the other. “Yes—but I’ve also something more to say to you.”

“Do you mean now?” the young man asked.

It was the first time he had spoken to her, and her hesitation might have signified a maidenly flutter. “No—but before she goes.”

Mrs. Gracedew took it amiably up. “Come back, then; I’m not going.” And there was both dismissal and encouragement in the way that, as on the occasion of the girl’s former retreat, she blew her a familiar kiss. Cora, still with her face to them, waited just enough to show that she took it without a response; then, with a quick turn, dashed out, while Mrs. Gracedew looked at their visitor in vague surprise. “What’s the matter with her?”

She had turned away as soon as she spoke, moving as far from him as she had moved a few moments before from Cora. The silence that, as he watched her, followed her question would have been seen by a spectator to be a hard one for either to break. “I don’t know what’s the matter with her,” he said at last; “I’m afraid I only know what’s the matter with me. It will doubtless give you pleasure to learn,” he added, “that I’ve closed with Mr. Prodmore.”

It was a speech that, strangely enough, seemed but half to dissipate the hush. Mrs. Gracedew reached the great chimney again; again she stood there with her face averted; and when she finally replied it was in other words than he might have supposed himself naturally to inspire. “I thought you said he gave you time.”

“Yes; but you produced just now so deep an effect on me that I thought best not to take any.” He appeared to listen to a sound from above, and, for a moment, under this impulse, his eyes travelled about almost as if he were alone. Then he completed, with deliberation, his statement. “I came upon him right there, and I burnt my ships.”

Mrs. Gracedew continued not to meet his face. “You do what he requires?”

The young man was markedly, consciously caught. “I do what he requires. I felt the tremendous force of all you said to me.”

She turned round on him now, as if perhaps with a slight sharpness, the face of responsibility—even, it might be, of reproach. “So did I—or I shouldn’t have said it!”

It was doubtless this element of justification in her tone that drew from him a laugh a tiny trifle dry. “You’re perhaps not aware that you wield an influence of which it’s not too much to say——”

But he paused at the important point so long that she took him up. “To say what?”

“Well, that it’s practically irresistible!”

It sounded a little as if it had not been what he first meant; but it made her, none the less, still graver and just faintly ironical. “You’ve given me the most flattering proof of my influence that I’ve ever enjoyed in my life!”

He fixed her very hard, now distinctly so mystified that he could only wonder what different recall of her previous attitude she would have looked for. “This was inevitable, dear madam, from the moment you had converted me—and in about three minutes too!—into the absolute echo of your raptures.”

Nothing was, indeed, more extraordinary than her air of having suddenly forgotten them. “My ‘raptures’?”

He was amazed. “Why, about my home.”

He might look her through and through, but she had no eyes for himself, though she had now quitted the fireplace and finally recognised this allusion. “Oh, yes—your home!” From where had she come back to it? “It’s a nice tattered, battered old thing.” This account of it was the more shrunken that her observation, even as she spoke, freshly went the rounds. “It has defects of course”—with this renewed attention they appeared suddenly to strike her. They had popped out, conspicuous, and for a little it might have been a matter of conscience. However, her conscience dropped. “But it’s no use mentioning them now!”

They had half an hour earlier been vividly present to himself, but to see her thus oddly pulled up by them was to forget on the spot the ground he had taken. “I’m particularly sorry,” he returned with some spirit, “that you didn’t mention them before!”

At this imputation of inconsequence, of a levity not, after all, without its excuse, Mrs. Gracedew was reduced, in keeping her resentment down, to an effort not quite successfully disguised. It was in a tone, nevertheless, all the more mild in intention that she reminded him of where he had equally failed. “If you had really gone over the house, as I almost went on my knees to you to do, you might have discovered some of them yourself!”

“How can you say that,” the young man asked with heat, “when I was precisely in the very act of it? It was just because I was that the first person I met above was Mr. Prodmore; on which, feeling that I must come to it sooner or later, I simply gave in to him on the spot—yielded him, to have it well over, the whole of his point.”

She listened to this account of the matter as she might have gazed, from afar, at some queer object that was scarce distinguishable. It left her a moment in the deepest thought, but she presently recovered her tone. “Let me then congratulate you on at last knowing what you want!”

But there were, after all, he instantly showed, no such great reasons for that. “I only know it so far as you know it! I struck while the iron was hot—or at any rate while the hammer was.”

“Of course I recognise”—she adopted his image with her restored gaiety—“that it can rarely have been exposed to such a fire. I blazed up, and I know that when I burn——”

She had pulled up with the foolish sense of this. “When you burn?”

“Well, I do it as Chicago does.”

He also could laugh out now. “Isn’t that usually down to the ground?”

Meeting his laugh, she threw up her light arms. “As high as the sky!” Then she came back, as with a scruple, to the real question. “I suppose you’ve still formalities to go through.”

“With Mr. Prodmore?” Well, he would suppose it too if she liked. “Oh, endless, tiresome ones, no doubt!”

This sketch of them made her wonder. “You mean they’ll take so very, very long?”

He seemed after all to know perfectly what he meant. “Every hour, every month, that I can possibly make them last!”

She was with him here, however, but to a certain point. “You mustn’t drag them out too much—must you? Won’t he think in that case you may want to retract?”

Yule apparently tried to focus Mr. Prodmore under this delusion, and with a success that had a quick, odd result. “I shouldn’t be so terribly upset by his mistake, you know, even if he did!”

His manner, with its slight bravado, left her proportionately shocked. “Oh, it would never do to give him any colour whatever for supposing you to have any doubt that, as one may say, you’ve pledged your honour.”

He devoted to this proposition more thought than its simplicity would have seemed to demand; but after a minute, at all events, his intelligence triumphed. “Of course not—not when I haven’t any doubt!”

Though his intelligence had triumphed, she still wished to show she was there to support it. “How can you possibly have any—any more than you can possibly have that one’s honour is everything in life?” And her charming eyes expressed to him her need to feel that he was quite at one with her on that point.

He could give her every assurance. “Oh, yes—everything in life!”

It did her much good, brought back the rest of her brightness. “Wasn’t it just of the question of the honour of things that we talked awhile ago—and of the difficulty of sometimes keeping our sense of it clear? There’s no more to be said therefore,” she went on with the faintest soft sigh about it, “except that I leave you to your ancient glory as I leave you to your strict duty.” She had these things there before her; they might have been a well-spread board from which she turned away fasting. “I hope you’ll do justice to dear old Covering in spite of its weak points, and I hope above all you’ll not be incommoded——”

As she hesitated here he was too intent. “Incommoded——?”

She saw it better than she could express it. “Well, by such a rage——!”

He challenged this description with a strange gleam. “You suppose it will be a rage?”

She laughed out at his look. “Are you afraid of the love that kills?”

He grew singularly grave. “Will it kill——?”

“Great passions have!”—she was highly amused.

But he could only stare. “Is it a great passion?”

“Surely—when so many feel it!”

He was fairly bewildered. “But how many——?”

She reckoned them up. “Let’s see. If you count them all——”

“‘All’?” Clement Yule gasped.

She looked at him, in turn, slightly mystified. “I see. You knock off some. About half?”

It was too obscure—he broke down. “Whom on earth are you talking about?”

“Why, the electors——”

“Of Gossage?”—he leaped at it. “Oh!”

“I got the whole thing up—there are six thousand. It’s such a fine figure!” said Mrs. Gracedew.

He had sharply passed from her, to cover his mistake, and it carried him half round the hall. Then, as if aware that this pause itself compromised him, he came back confusedly and with her last words in his ear. “Has she a fine figure?”

But her own thoughts were off. “‘She’?”

He blushed and recovered himself. “Aren’t we talking——”

“Of Gossage? Oh, yes—she has every charm! Good-bye,” said Mrs. Gracedew.

He pulled, at this, the longest face, but was kept dumb a moment by the very decision with which she again began to gather herself. It held him helpless, and there was finally real despair in his retarded protest. “You don’t mean to say you’re going?”

“You don’t mean to say you’re surprised at it? Haven’t I done,” she luminously asked, “what I told you I had been so mystically moved to come for?” She recalled to him by her renewed supreme survey the limited character of this errand, which she then in a brisk familiar word expressed to the house itself. “You dear old thing—you’re saved!”

Clement Yule might on the other hand, by his simultaneous action, have given himself out for lost. “For God’s sake,” he cried as he circled earnestly round her, “don’t go till I can come back to thank you!” He pulled out his watch. “I promised to return immediately to Prodmore.”

This completely settled his visitor. “Then don’t let me, for a moment more, keep you away from him. You must have such lots”—it went almost without saying—“to talk comfortably over.”

The young man’s embrace of that was, in his restless movement, to roam to the end of the hall furthest from the stairs. But here his assent was entire. “I certainly feel, you know, that I must see him again.” He rambled even to the open door and looked with incoherence into the court. “Yes, decidedly, I must!”

“Is he out there?” Mrs. Gracedew lightly asked.

He turned short round. “No—I left him in the long gallery.”

“You saw that, then?”—she flashed back into eagerness. “Isn’t it lovely?”

Clement Yule rather wondered. “I didn’t notice it. How could I?”

His face was so woeful that she broke into a laugh. “How couldn’t you? Notice it now, then. Go up to him!”

He crossed at last to the staircase, but at the foot he stopped again. “Will you wait for me?”

He had such an air of proposing a bargain, of making the wait a condition, that she had to look it well in the face. The result of her doing so, however, was apparently a strong sense that she could give him no pledge. Her silence, after a moment, expressed that; but, for a further emphasis, moving away, she sank suddenly into the chair she had already occupied and in which, serious again and very upright, she continued to withhold her promise. “Go up to him!” she simply repeated. He obeyed, with an abrupt turn, mounting briskly enough several steps, but pausing midway and looking back at her as if he were after all irresolute. He was in fact so much so that, at the sight of her still in her chair and alone by his cold hearth, he descended a few steps again and seemed, with too much decidedly on his mind, on the point of breaking out. She had sat a minute in such thought, figuring him clearly as gone, that at the sound of his return she sprang up with a protest. This checked him afresh, and he remained where he had paused, still on the ascent and exchanging with her a look to which neither party was inspired, oddly enough, to contribute a word. It struck him, without words, at all events, as enough, and he now took his upward course at such a pace that he presently disappeared. She listened awhile to his retreating tread; then her own, on the old flags of the hall, became rapid, though, it may perhaps be added, directed to no visible end. It conveyed her, in the great space, from point to point, but she now for the first time moved there without attention and without joy, her course determined by a series of such inward throbs as might have been the suppressed beats of a speech. A real observer, had such a monster been present, would have followed this tacit evolution from sign to sign and from shade to shade. “Why didn’t he tell me all?—But it was none of my business!—What does he mean to do?—What should he do but what he has done?—And what can he do, when he’s so deeply committed, when he’s practically engaged, when he’s just the same as married—and buried?—The thing for me to ‘do’ is just to pull up short and bundle out: to remove from the scene they encumber the numerous fragments—well, of what?”

Her thought was plainly arrested by the sight of Cora Prodmore, who, returning from the garden, reappeared first in the court and then in the open doorway. Mrs. Gracedew’s was a thought, however, that, even when desperate, was never quite vanquished, and it found a presentable public solution in the pieces of the vase smashed by Chivers and just then, on the table where he had laid them, catching her eye. “Of my old Chelsea pot!” Her gay, sad headshake as she took one of them up pronounced for Cora’s benefit its funeral oration. She laid the morsel thoughtfully down, while her visitor seemed with simple dismay to read the story.

VI

“Has he been breaking——?” the girl asked in horror.

Mrs. Gracedew laughingly tapped her heart. “Yes, we’ve had a scene! He went up again to your father.”

Cora was disconcerted. “Papa’s not there. He just came down to me by the other way.”

“Then he can join you here,” said Mrs. Gracedew with instant resignation. “I’m going.”

“Just when I’ve come back to you—at the risk,” Cora made bold to throw off, “of again interrupting, though I really hoped he had gone, your conversation with Captain Yule?”

But Mrs. Gracedew let the ball quite drop. “I’ve nothing to say to Captain Yule.”

Cora picked it up for another toss. “You had a good deal to say a few minutes ago!”

“Well, I’ve said it, and it’s over. I’ve nothing more to say at all,” Mrs. Gracedew insisted. But her announcement of departure left her on this occasion, as each of its predecessors had done, with a last, with indeed a fresh, solicitude. “What has become of my delightful ‘party’?”

“They’ve been dismissed, through the grounds, by the other door. But they mentioned,” the girl pursued, “the probable arrival of a fresh lot.”

Mrs. Gracedew showed on this such a revival of interest as fairly amounted to yearning. “Why, what times you have! You,” she nevertheless promptly decreed, “must take the fresh lot—since the house is now practically yours!”

Poor Cora looked blank. “Mine?”

Her companion matched her stare. “Why, if you’re going to marry Captain Yule.”

Cora coloured, in a flash, to the eyes. “I’m not going to marry Captain Yule!”

Her friend as quickly paled again. “Why on earth then did you tell me only ten minutes ago that you were?”

Cora could only look bewildered at the charge. “I told you nothing of the sort. I only told you”—she was almost indignantly positive—“that he had been ordered me!”

It sent Mrs. Gracedew off; she moved away to indulge an emotion that presently put on the form of extravagant mirth. “Like a dose of medicine or a course of baths?”

The girl’s gravity and lucidity sustained themselves. “As a remedy for the single life.” Oh, she had mastered the matter now! “But I won’t take him!”

“Ah, then, why didn’t you let me know?” Mrs. Gracedew panted.

“I was on the very point of it when he came in and interrupted us.” Cora clearly felt she might be wicked, but was at least not stupid. “It’s just to let you know that I’m here now.”

Ah, the difference it made! This difference, for Mrs. Gracedew, suddenly shimmered in all the place, and her companion’s fixed eyes caught in her face the reflection of it. “Excuse me—I misunderstood. I somehow took for granted——!” She stopped, a trifle awkwardly—suddenly tender, for Cora, as to the way she had inevitably seen it.

“You took for granted I’d jump at him? Well, you can take it for granted I won’t!”

Mrs. Gracedew, fairly admiring her, put it sympathetically. “You prefer the single life?”

“No—but I don’t prefer him!” Cora was crystal-bright.

Her light, indeed, for her friend, was at first almost blinding; it took Mrs. Gracedew a moment to distinguish—which she then did, however, with immense eagerness. “You prefer someone else?” Cora’s promptitude dropped at this, and, starting to hear it, as you might well have seen, for the first time publicly phrased, she abruptly moved away. A minute’s sense of her scruple was enough for Mrs. Gracedew: this was proved by the tone of soft remonstrance and high benevolence with which that lady went on. She had looked very hard, first, at one of the old warriors hung on the old wall, and almost spoke as if he represented their host. “He seems remarkably clever.”

Cora, at something in the sound, quite jumped about. “Then why don’t you marry him yourself?”

Mrs. Gracedew gave a sort of happy sigh. “Well, I’ve got fifty reasons! I rather think one of them must be that he hasn’t happened to ask me.”

It was a speech, however, that her visitor could easily better. “I haven’t got fifty reasons, but I have got one.”

Mrs. Gracedew smiled as if it were indeed a stroke of wit. “You mean your case is one of those in which safety is not in numbers?” And then on Cora’s visibly not understanding: “It is when reasons are bad that one needs so many!”

The proposition was too general for the girl to embrace, but the simplicity of her answer was far from spoiling it. “My reason is awfully good.”

Mrs. Gracedew did it complete justice. “I see. An older friend.”

Cora listened as at a warning sound; yet she had by this time practically let herself go, and it took but Mrs. Gracedew’s extended encouraging hand, which she quickly seized, to bring the whole thing out. “I’ve been trying this hour, in my terrible need of advice, to tell you about him!” It came in a small clear torrent, a soft tumble-out of sincerity. “After we parted—you and I—at the station, he suddenly turned up there, and I took a little quiet walk with him which gave you time to get here before me and of which my father is in a state of ignorance that I don’t know whether to regard as desirable or dreadful.”

Mrs. Gracedew, attentive and wise, might have been, for her face, the old family solicitor. “You want me then to inform your father?” It was a wonderful intonation.

Poor Cora, for that matter too, might suddenly have become under this touch the prodigal with a list of debts. She seemed an instant to look out of a blurred office window-pane at a grey London sky; then she broke away. “I really don’t know what I want. I think,” she honestly admitted, “I just want kindness.”

Mrs. Gracedew’s expression might have hinted—but not for too long—that Bedford Row was an odd place to apply for it; she appeared for an instant to make the revolving office-chair creak. “What do you mean by kindness?”

Cora was a model client—she perfectly knew. “I mean help.”

Mrs. Gracedew closed an inkstand with a clap and locked a couple of drawers. “What do you mean by help?”

The client’s inevitable answer seemed to perch on the girl’s lips: “A thousand pounds.” But it came out in another, in a much more charming form. “I mean that I love him.”

The family solicitor got up: it was a high figure. “And does he love you?”

Cora hesitated. “Ask him.”

Mrs. Gracedew weighed the necessity. “Where is he?”

“Waiting.” And the girl’s glance, removed from her companion and wandering aloft and through space, gave the scale of his patience.

Her adviser, however, required the detail. “But where?”

Cora briefly demurred again. “In that funny old grotto.”

Mrs. Gracedew thought. “Funny?”

“Half-way from the park gate. It’s very nice!” Cora more eagerly added.

Mrs. Gracedew continued to reflect. “Oh, I know it!” She spoke as if she had known it most of her life.

Her tone encouraged her client. “Then will you see him?”

“No.” This time it was almost dry.

“No?”

“No. If you want help——” Mrs. Gracedew, still musing, explained.

“Yes?”

“Well—you want a great deal.”

“Oh, so much!”—Cora but too woefully took it in. “I want,” she quavered, “all there is!”

“Well—you shall have it.”

“All there is?”—she convulsively held her to it.

Mrs. Gracedew had finally mastered it. “I’ll see your father.”

“You dear, delicious lady!” Her young friend had again encompassed her; but, passive and preoccupied, she showed some of the chill of apprehension. It was indeed as if to meet this that Cora went earnestly on: “He’s intensely sympathetic!”

“Your father?” Mrs. Gracedew had her reserves.

“Oh, no—the other person. I so believe in him!” Cora cried.

Mrs. Gracedew looked at her a moment. “Then so do I—and I like him for believing in you.”

“Oh, he does that,” the girl hurried on, “far more than Captain Yule—I could see just with one glance that he doesn’t at all. Papa has of course seen the young man I mean, but we’ve been so sure papa would hate it that we’ve had to be awfully careful. He’s the son of the richest man at Bellborough, he’s Granny’s godson, and he’ll inherit his father’s business, which is simply immense. Oh, from the point of view of the things he’s in”—and Cora found herself sharp on this—“he’s quite as good as papa himself. He has been away for three days, and if he met me at the station, where, on his way back, he has to change, it was by the merest chance in the world. I wouldn’t love him,” she brilliantly wound up, “if he wasn’t nice.”

“A man’s always nice if you will love him!” Mrs. Gracedew laughed.

Her young friend more than met it. “He’s nicer still if he ‘will’ love you!”

But Mrs. Gracedew kept her head. “Nicer of course than if he won’t! But are you sure this gentleman does love you?”

“As sure as that the other one doesn’t.”

“Ah, but the other one doesn’t know you.”

“Yes, thank goodness—and never shall!”

Mrs. Gracedew watched her a little, but on the girl’s meeting her eyes turned away with a quick laugh. “You mean of course till it’s too late.”

“Altogether!” Cora spoke as with quite the measure of the time.

Mrs. Gracedew, revolving a moment in silence, appeared to accept her showing. “Then what’s the matter?” she impatiently asked.

“The matter?”

“Your father’s objection to the gentleman in the grotto.”

Cora now for the first time faltered. “His name.”

This for a moment pulled up her friend, in whom, however, relief seemed to contend with alarm. “Only his name?”

“Yes, but——” Cora’s eyes rolled.

Her companion invitingly laughed. “But it’s enough?”

Her roll confessingly fixed itself. “Not enough—that’s just the trouble!”

Mrs. Gracedew looked kindly curious. “What then is it?”

Cora faced the music. “Pegg.”

Mrs. Gracedew stared. “Nothing else?”

“Nothing to speak of.” The girl was quite candid now. “Hall.”

“Nothing before——?”

“Not a letter.”

“Hall Pegg?” Mrs. Gracedew had winced, but she quickly recovered herself, and, for a further articulation, appeared, from delicacy, to form the sound only with her mind. The sound she formed with her lips was, after an instant, simply “Oh!”

It was to the combination of the spoken and the unspoken that Cora desperately replied. “It sounds like a hat-rack!”

“‘Hall Pegg’? ‘Hall Pegg’?” Mrs. Gracedew now made it, like a questionable coin, ring upon the counter. But it lay there as lead and without, for a moment, her taking it up again. “How many has your father?” she inquired instead.

“How many names?” Miss Prodmore seemed dimly to see that there was no hope in that. “He somehow makes out five.”

“Oh, that’s too many!” Mrs. Gracedew jeeringly declared.

“Papa unfortunately doesn’t think so, when Captain Yule, I believe, has six.”

“Six?” Mrs. Gracedew, alert, looked as if that might be different.

“Papa, in the morning-room, told me them all.”

Mrs. Gracedew visibly considered, then for a moment dropped Mr. Pegg. “And what are they!”

“Oh, all sorts. ‘Marmaduke Clement——’” Cora tried to recall.

Mrs. Gracedew, however, had already checked her. “I see—‘Marmaduke Clement’ will do.” She appeared for a minute intent, but, as with an energetic stoop, she picked up Mr. Pegg. “But so will yours,” she said, with decision.

“Mine?—you mean his!”

“The same thing—what you’ll be.”

“Mrs. Hall Pegg!”—Cora tried it, with resolution, loudly.

It fell a little flat in the noble space, but Mrs. Gracedew’s manner quickly covered it. “It won’t make you a bit less charming.”

Cora wondered—she hoped. “Only for papa.”

And what was he? Mrs. Gracedew by this time seemed assentingly to ask. “Never for me!” she soothingly declared.

Cora took this in with deep thanks that gripped and patted her companion’s hand. “You accept it more than gracefully. But if you could only make him——!”

Mrs. Gracedew was all concentration. “‘Him’? Mr. Pegg?”

“No—he naturally has to accept it. But papa.”

She looked harder still at this greater feat, then seemed to see light. “Well, it will be difficult—but I will.”

Doubt paled before it. “Oh, you heavenly thing!”

Mrs. Gracedew after an instant, sustained by this appreciation, went a step further. “And I’ll make him say he does!”

Cora closed her eyes with the dream of it. “Oh, if I could only hear him!”

Her benefactress had at last run it to earth. “It will be enough if I do.”

Cora quickly considered; then, with prompt accommodation, gave the comfortable measure of her faith. “Yes—I think it will.” She was quite ready to retire. “I’ll give you time.”

“Thank you,” said Mrs. Gracedew; “but before you give me time give me something better.”

This pulled the girl up a little, as if in parting with her secret she had parted with her all. “Something better?”

“If I help you, you know,” Mrs. Gracedew explained, “you must help me.”

“But how?”

“By a clear assurance.” The charming woman’s fine face now gave the real example of clearness. “That if Captain Yule should propose to you, you would unconditionally refuse him.”

Cora flushed with the surprise of its being only that. “With my dying breath!”

Mrs. Gracedew scanned her robust vitality. “Will you make it even a promise?”

The girl looked about her in solid certainty. “Do you want me to sign——?”

Mrs. Gracedew was quick. “No, don’t sign!”

Yet Cora was so ready to oblige. “Then what shall I do?”

Mrs. Gracedew turned away, but after a few vague steps faced her again. “Kiss me.”

Cora flew to her arms, and the compact had scarce been sealed before the younger of the parties was already at the passage to the front. “We meet of course at the station.”

Mrs. Gracedew thought. “If all goes well. But where shall you be meanwhile?”

Her confederate had no need to think. “Can’t you guess?”

The bang of the house-door, the next minute, so helped the answer to the riddle as fairly to force it, when she found herself alone, from her lips. “At that funny old grotto? Well,” she sighed, “I like funny old grottos!” She found herself alone, however, only for a minute; Mr. Prodmore’s formidable presence had darkened the door from the court.

VII

“My daughter’s not here?” he demanded from the threshold.

“Your daughter’s not here.” She had rapidly got under arms. “But it’s a convenience to me, Mr. Prodmore, that you are, for I’ve something very particular to ask you.”

Her interlocutor crossed straight to the morning-room. “I shall be delighted to answer your question, but I must first put my hand on Miss Prodmore.” This hand the next instant stayed itself on the latch, and he appealed to the amiable visitor. “Unless indeed she’s occupied in there with Captain Yule?”

The amiable visitor met the appeal. “I don’t think she’s occupied—anywhere—with Captain Yule.”

Mr. Prodmore came straight away from the door. “Then where the deuce is Captain Yule?”

The amiable visitor turned a trifle less direct. “His absence, for which I’m responsible, is just what renders the inquiry I speak of to you possible.” She had already assumed a most inquiring air, yet it was soon clear that she needed every advantage her manner could give her. “What will you take——? what will you take——?”

It had the sound, as she faltered, of a general question, and Mr. Prodmore raised his eyebrows. “Take? Nothing, thank you—I’ve just had a cup of tea.” Then suddenly, as if on the broad hint: “Won’t you have one?”

“Yes, with pleasure—but not yet.” She looked about her again; she was now at close quarters and, concentrated, anxious, pressed her hand a moment to her brow.

This struck her companion. “Don’t you think you’d be better for it immediately?”

“No.” She was positive. “No.” Her eyes consciously wandered. “I want to know how you’d value——”

He took her, as his own followed them, more quickly up, expanding in the presence of such a tribute from a real connoisseur. “One of these charming old things that take your fancy?”

She looked at him straight now. “They all take my fancy!”

“All?” He enjoyed it as the joke of a rich person—the kind of joke he sometimes made himself.

“Every single one!” said Mrs. Gracedew. Then with still a finer shade of the familiar: “Should you be willing to treat, Mr. Prodmore, for your interest in this property?”

He threw back his head: she had scattered over the word “interest” such a friendly, faded colour. She was either not joking or was rich indeed; and there was a place always kept in his conversation for the arrival of money, as there is always a box in a well-appointed theatre for that of royalty. “Am I to take it from you then that you know about my interest——?”

“Everything!” said Mrs. Gracedew with a world of wit.

“Excuse me, madam!”—he himself was now more reserved. “You don’t know everything if you don’t know that my interest—considerable as it might well have struck you—has just ceased to exist. I’ve given it up”—Mr. Prodmore softened the blow—“for a handsome equivalent.”

The blow fell indeed light enough. “You mean for a handsome son-in-law?”

“It will be by some such description as the term you use that I shall doubtless, in the future, permit myself, in the common course, to allude to Captain Yule. Unless indeed I call him——” But Mr. Prodmore dropped the bolder thought. “It will depend on what he calls me.”

Mrs. Gracedew covered him a moment with the largeness of her charity. “Won’t it depend a little on what your daughter herself calls him?”

Mr. Prodmore seriously considered. “No. That,” he declared with delicacy, “will be between the happy pair.”

“Am I to take it from you then—I adopt your excellent phrase,” Mrs. Gracedew said—“that Miss Prodmore has already accepted him?”

Her companion, with his head still in the air, seemed to signify that he simply put it down on the table and that she could take it or not as she liked. “Her character—formed by my assiduous care—enables me to locate her, I may say even to time her, from moment to moment.” His massive watch, as he opened it, further sustained him in this process. “It’s my assured conviction that she’s accepting him while we stand here.”

Mrs. Gracedew was so affected by his assured conviction that, with an odd, inarticulate sound, she forbore to stand longer—she rapidly moved away, taking one of the brief excursions of step and sense that had been for her, from the first, under the noble roof, so many dumb but decisive communions. But it was soon over, and she floated back on a wave that showed her to be, since she had let herself go, by this time quite in the swing and describing a considerable curve. “Dear Mr. Prodmore, why are you so imprudent as to make your daughter afraid of you? You should have taught her to confide in you. She has clearly shown me,” she almost soothingly pursued, “that she can confide.”

Mr. Prodmore, however, suddenly starting, looked far from soothed. “She confides in you?”

“You may take it from me!” Mrs. Gracedew laughed. “Let me suggest that, as fortune has thrown us together a minute, you follow her good example.” She put out a reassuring hand—she could perfectly show him the way. “Tell me, for instance, the ground of your objection to poor Mr. Pegg. I mean Mr. Pegg of Bellborough, Mr. Hall Pegg, the godson of your daughter’s grandmother and the associate of his father in their flourishing house; to whom (as he is to it and to her) Miss Prodmore’s devotedly attached.”

Mr. Prodmore had in the course of this speech availed himself of the support of the nearest chair, where, in spite of his subsidence, he appeared in his amazement twice his natural size. “It has gone so far as that?”

She rose before him as if in triumph. “It has gone so far that you had better let it go the rest of the way!”

He had lost breath, but he had positively gained dignity. “It’s too monstrous, to have plotted to keep me in the dark!”

“Why, it’s only when you’re kept in the dark that your daughter’s kept in the light!” She argued it with a candour that might have served for brilliancy. “It’s at her own earnest request that I plead to you for her liberty of choice. She’s an honest girl—perhaps even a peculiar girl; and she’s not a baby. You over-do, I think, the nursing. She has a perfect right to her preference.”

Poor Mr. Prodmore couldn’t help taking it from her, and, this being the case, he still took it in the most convenient way. “And pray haven’t I a perfect right to mine?” he asked from his chair.

She fairly seemed to serve it up to him—to put down the dish with a flourish. “Not at her expense. You expect her to give up too much.”

“And what has she,” he appealed, “expected me to give up? What but the desire of my heart and the dream of my life? Captain Yule announced to me but a few minutes since his intention to offer her his hand.”

She faced him on it as over the table. “Well, if he does, I think he’ll simply find——”

“Find what?” They looked at each other hard.

“Why, that she won’t have it.”

Oh, Mr. Prodmore now sprang up. “She will!”

“She won’t!” Mrs. Gracedew more distinctly repeated.

“She shall!” returned her adversary, making for the staircase with the evident sense of where reinforcement might be most required.

Mrs. Gracedew, however, with a spring, was well before him. “She shan’t!” She spoke with positive passion and practically so barred the way that he stood arrested and bewildered, and they faced each other, for a flash, like enemies. But it all went out, on her part, in a flash too—in a sudden wonderful smile. “Now tell me how much!”

Mr. Prodmore continued to glare—the sweat was on his brow. But while he slowly wiped it with a pocket-handkerchief of splendid scarlet silk, he remained so silent that he would have had for a spectator the effect of meeting in a manner her question. More formally to answer it he had at last to turn away. “How can I tell you anything so preposterous?”

She was all ready to inform him. “Simply by computing the total amount to which, for your benefit, this unhappy estate is burdened.” He listened with his back presented, but that appeared to strike her, as she fixed this expanse, as an encouragement to proceed. “If I’ve troubled you by showing you that your speculation is built on the sand, let me atone for it by my eagerness to take off your hands an investment from which you derive so little profit.”

He at last gave her his attention, but quite as if there were nothing in it. “And pray what profit will you derive——?”

“Ah, that’s my own secret!” She would show him as well no glimpse of it—her laugh but rattled the box. “I want this house!”

“So do I, damn me!” he roundly returned; “and that’s why I’ve practically paid for it!” He stuffed away his pocket-handkerchief.

There was nevertheless something in her that could hold him, and it came out, after an instant, quietly and reasonably enough. “I’ll practically pay for it, Mr. Prodmore—if you’ll only tell me your figure.”

“My figure?”

“Your figure.”

Mr. Prodmore waited—then removed his eyes from her face. He appeared to have waited on purpose to let her hope of a soft answer fall from a greater height. “My figure would be quite my own!”

“Then it will match, in that respect,” Mrs. Gracedew laughed, “this overture, which is quite my own! As soon as you’ve let me know it I cable to Missoura Top to have the money sent right out to you.”

Mr. Prodmore surveyed in a superior manner this artless picture of a stroke of business. “You imagine that having the money sent right out to me will make you owner of this place?”

She herself, with her head on one side, studied her sketch and seemed to twirl her pencil. “No—not quite. But I’ll settle the rest with Captain Yule.”

Her companion looked, over his white waistcoat, at his large tense shoes, the patent-leather shine of which so flashed propriety back at him that he became, the next moment, doubly erect on it. “Captain Yule has nothing to sell.”

She received the remark with surprise. “Then what have you been trying to buy?”

She had touched in himself even a sharper spring. “Do you mean to say,” he cried, “you want to buy that?” She stared at his queer emphasis, which was intensified by a queer grimace; then she turned from him with a change of colour and an ejaculation that led to nothing more, after a few seconds, than a somewhat conscious silence—a silence of which Mr. Prodmore made use to follow up his unanswered question with another. “Is your proposal that I should transfer my investment to you for the mere net amount of it your conception of a fair bargain?”

This second inquiry, however, she could, as she slowly came round, substantially meet. “Pray, then, what is yours?”

“Mine would be, not that I should simply get my money back, but that I should get the effective value of the house.”

Mrs. Gracedew considered it. “But isn’t the effective value of the house just what your money expresses?”

The lid of his hard left eye, the harder of the two, just dipped with the effect of a wink. “No, madam. It’s just what yours does. It’s moreover just what your lips have already expressed so distinctly!”

She clearly did her best to follow him. “To those people—when I showed the place off?”

Mr. Prodmore laughed. “You seemed to be taking bids then!”

She was candid, but earnest. “Taking them?”

“Oh, like an auctioneer! You ran it up high!” And Mr. Prodmore laughed again.

She turned a little pale, but it added to her brightness. “I certainly did, if saying it was charming——”

“Charming?” Mr. Prodmore broke in. “You said it was magnificent. You said it was unique. That was your very word. You said it was the perfect specimen of its class in England.” He was more than accusatory, he was really crushing. “Oh, you got in deep!”

It was indeed an indictment, and her smile was perhaps now rather set. “Possibly. But taunting me with my absurd high spirits and the dreadful liberties I took doesn’t in the least tell me how deep you’re in!”

“For you, Mrs. Gracedew?” He took a few steps, looking at his shoes again and as if to give her time to plead—since he wished to be quite fair—that it was not for her. “I’m in to the tune of fifty thousand.”

She was silent, on this announcement, so long that he once more faced her; but if what he showed her in doing so at last made her speak, it also took the life from her tone. “That’s a great deal of money, Mr. Prodmore.”

The tone didn’t matter, but only the truth it expressed, which he so thoroughly liked to hear. “So I’ve often had occasion to say to myself!”

“If it’s a large sum for you, then,” said Mrs. Gracedew, “it’s a still larger one for me.” She sank into a chair with a vague melancholy; such a mass loomed huge, and she sat down before it as a solitary herald, resigning himself with a sigh to wait, might have leaned against a tree before a besieged city. “We women”—she wished to conciliate—“have more modest ideas.”

But Mr. Prodmore would scarce condescend to parley. “Is it as a ‘modest idea’ that you describe your extraordinary intrusion——?”

His question scarce reached her; she was so lost for the moment in the sense of innocent community with her sex. “I mean I think we measure things often rather more exactly.”

There would have been no doubt of Mr. Prodmore’s very different community as he rudely replied: “Then you measured this thing exactly half an hour ago!”

It was a long way to go back, but Mrs. Gracedew, in her seat, musingly made the journey, from which she then suddenly returned with a harmless, indeed quite a happy, memento. “Was I very grotesque?”

He demurred. “Grotesque?”

“I mean—did I go on about it?”

Mr. Prodmore would have no general descriptions; he was specific, he was vivid. “You banged the desk. You raved. You shrieked.”

This was a note she appeared indulgently, almost tenderly, to recognise. “We do shriek at Missoura Top!”

“I don’t know what you do at Missoura Top, but I know what you did at Covering End!”

She warmed at last to his tone. “So do I then! I surprised you. You weren’t at all prepared——”

He took her briskly up. “No—and I’m not prepared yet!”

Mrs. Gracedew could quite see it. “Yes, you’re too astonished.”

“My astonishment’s my own affair,” he retorted—“not less so than my memory!”

“Oh, I yield to your memory,” said the charming woman, “and I confess my extravagance. But quite, you know, as extravagance.”

“I don’t at all know,”—Mr. Prodmore shook it off,—“nor what you call extravagance.”

“Why, banging the desk. Raving. Shrieking. I over-did it,” she exclaimed; “I wanted to please you!”

She had too happy a beauty, as she sat in her high-backed chair, to have been condemned to say that to any man without a certain effect. The effect on Mr. Prodmore was striking. “So you said,” he sternly inquired, “what you didn’t believe?”

She flushed with the avowal. “Yes—for you.”

He looked at her hard. “For me?”

Under his eye—for her flush continued—she slowly got up. “And for those good people.”

“Oh!”—he sounded most sarcastic. “Should you like me to call them back?”

“No.” She was still gay enough, but very decided. “I took them in.”

“And now you want to take me?”

“Oh, Mr. Prodmore!” she almost pitifully, but not quite adequately, moaned.

He appeared to feel he had gone a little far. “Well, if we’re not what you say——”

“Yes?”—she looked up askance at the stroke.

“Why the devil do you want us?” The question rang out and was truly for the poor lady, as the quick suffusion of her eyes showed, a challenge it would take more time than he left her properly to pick up. He left her in fact no time at all before he went on: “Why the devil did you say you’d offer fifty?”

She looked quite wan and seemed to wonder. “Did I say that?” She could only let his challenge lie. “It was a figure of speech!”

“Then that’s the kind of figure we’re talking about!” Mr. Prodmore’s sharpness would have struck an auditor as the more effective that, on the heels of this thrust, seeing the ancient butler reappear, he dropped the victim of it as comparatively unimportant and directed his fierceness instantly to Chivers, who mildly gaped at him from the threshold of the court. “Have you seen Miss Prodmore? If you haven’t, find her!”

Mrs. Gracedew addressed their visitor in a very different tone, though with the full authority of her benevolence. “You won’t, my dear man.” To Mr. Prodmore also she continued bland. “I happen to know she has gone for a walk.”

“A walk—alone?” Mr. Prodmore gasped.

“No—not alone.” Mrs. Gracedew looked at Chivers with a vague smile of appeal for help, but he could only give her, from under his bent old brow, the blank decency of his wonder. It seemed to make her feel afresh that she was, after all, alone—so that in her loneliness, which had also its fine sad charm, she risked another brush with their formidable friend. “Cora has gone with Mr. Pegg.”

“Pegg has been here?”

It was like a splash in a full basin, but she launched the whole craft. “He walked with her from the station.”

“When she arrived?” Mr. Prodmore rose like outraged Neptune. “That’s why she was so late?”

Mrs. Gracedew assented. “Why I got here first. I get everywhere first!” she bravely laughed.

Mr. Prodmore looked round him in purple dismay—it was so clearly a question for him where he should get, and what! “In which direction did they go?” he imperiously asked.

His rudeness was too evident to be more than lightly recognised. “I think I must let you ascertain for yourself!”

All he could do then was to shout it to Chivers. “Call my carriage, you ass!” After which, as the old man melted into the vestibule, he dashed about blindly for his hat, pounced upon it and seemed, furious but helpless, on the point of hurling it at his contradictress as a gage of battle. “So you abetted and protected this wicked, low intrigue?”

She had something in her face now that was indifferent to any violence. “You’re too disappointed to see your real interest: oughtn’t I therefore in common charity to point it out to you?”

He faced her question so far as to treat it as one. “What do you know of my disappointment?”

There was something in his very harshness that even helped her, for it added at this moment to her sense of making out in his narrowed glare a couple of tears of rage. “I know everything.”

“What do you know of my real interest?” he went on as if he had not heard her.

“I know enough for my purpose—which is to offer you a handsome condition. I think it’s not I who have protected the happy understanding that you call by so ugly a name; it’s the happy understanding that has put me”—she gained confidence—“well, in a position. Do drive after them, if you like—but catch up with them only to forgive them. If you’ll do that, I’ll pay your price.”

The particular air with which, a minute after Mrs. Gracedew had spoken these words, Mr. Prodmore achieved a transfer of his attention to the inside of his hat—this special shade of majesty would have taxed the descriptive resources of the most accomplished reporter. It is none the less certain that he appeared for some time absorbed in that receptacle—appeared at last to breathe into it hard. “What do you call my price?”

“Why, the sum you just mentioned—fifty thousand!” Mrs. Gracedew feverishly quavered.

He looked at her as if stupefied. “That’s not my price—and it never for a moment was!” If derision can be dry, Mr. Prodmore’s was of the driest. “Besides,” he rang out, “my price is up!”

She caught it with a long wail. “Up?”

Oh, he let her have it now! “Seventy thousand.”

She turned away overwhelmed, but still with voice for her despair. “Oh, deary me!”

Mr. Prodmore was already at the door, from which he launched his ultimatum. “It’s to take or to leave!”

She would have had to leave it, perhaps, had not something happened at this moment to nerve her for the effort of staying him with a quick motion. Captain Yule had come into sight on the staircase and, after just faltering at what he himself saw, had marched resolutely enough down. She watched him arrive—watched him with an attention that visibly and responsively excited his own; after which she passed nearer to their companion. “Seventy thousand, then!”—it gleamed between them, in her muffled hiss, as if she had planted a dagger.

Mr. Prodmore, to do him justice, took his wound in front. “Seventy thousand—done!” And, without another look at Yule, he was presently heard to bang the outer door after him for a sign.

VIII

The young man, meanwhile, had approached in surprise. “He’s gone? I’ve been looking for him!”

Mrs. Gracedew was out of breath; there was a disturbed whiteness of bosom in her which needed time to subside and which she might have appeared to retreat before him on purpose to veil. “I don’t think, you know, that you need him—now.”

Clement Yule was mystified. “Now?”

She recovered herself enough to explain—made an effort at least to be plausible. “I mean that—if you don’t mind—you must deal with me. I’ve arranged with Mr. Prodmore to take it over.”

Oh, he gave her no help! “Take what over?”

She looked all about as if not quite thinking what it could be called; at last, however, she offered with a smile a sort of substitute for a name. “Why, your debt.”

But he was only the more bewildered. “Can you—without arranging with me?”

She turned it round, but as if merely to oblige him. “That’s precisely what I want to do.” Then, more brightly, as she thought further: “That is, I mean, I want you to arrange with me. Surely you will,” she said encouragingly.

His own processes, in spite of a marked earnestness, were much less rapid. “But if I arrange with anybody——”

“Yes?” She cheerfully waited.

“How do I perform my engagement?”

“The one to Mr. Prodmore?”

He looked surprised at her speaking as if he had half-a-dozen. “Yes—that’s the worst.”

“Certainly—the worst!” And she gave a happy laugh that made him stare.

He broke into quite a different one. “You speak as if its being the worst made it the best!”

“It does—for me. You don’t,” said Mrs. Gracedew, “perform any engagement.”

He required a moment to take it in; then something extraordinary leaped into his face. “He lets me off?”

Ah, she could ring out now! “He lets you off.”

It lifted him high, but only to drop him with an audible thud. “Oh, I see—I lose my house!”

“Dear, no—that doesn’t follow!” She spoke as if the absurdity he indicated were the last conceivable, but there was a certain want of sharpness of edge in her expression of the alternative. “You arrange with me to keep it.”

There was quite a corresponding want, clearly, in the image presented to the Captain—of which, for a moment, he seemed with difficulty to follow the contour. “How do I arrange?”

“Well, we must think,” said Mrs. Gracedew; “we must wait.” She spoke as if this were a detail for which she had not yet had much attention; only bringing out, however, the next instant in an encouraging cry and as if it were by itself almost a solution: “We must find some way!” She might have been talking to a reasonable child.

But even reasonable children ask too many questions. “Yes—and what way can we find?” Clement Yule, glancing about him, was so struck with the absence of ways that he appeared to remember with something of regret how different it had been before. “With Prodmore it was simple enough. You see I could marry his daughter.”

Mrs. Gracedew was silent just long enough for her soft ironic smile to fill the cup of the pause. “Could you?”

It was as if he had tasted in the words the wine at the brim; for he gave, under the effect of them, a sudden headshake and an awkward laugh. “Well, never perhaps that exactly—when it came to the point. But I had to, you see——” It was difficult to say just what.

She took advantage of it, looking hard, but not seeing at all. “You had to——?”

“Well,” he repeated ruefully, “think a lot about it. You didn’t suspect that?”

Oh, if he came to suspicions she could only break off! “Don’t ask me too many questions.”

He looked an instant as if he wondered why. “But isn’t this just the moment for them?” He fronted her, with a quickness he tried to dissimulate, from the other side. “What did you suppose?”

She looked everywhere but into his face. “Why, I supposed you were in distress.”

He was very grave. “About his terms?”

“About his terms of course!” she laughed. “Not about his religious opinions.”

His gratitude was too great for gaiety. “You really, in your beautiful sympathy, guessed my fix?”

But she declined to be too solemn. “Dear Captain Yule, it all quite stuck out of you!”

“You mean I floundered like a drowning man——?”

Well, she consented to have meant that. “Till I plunged in!”

He appeared there for a few seconds, to see her again take the jump and to listen again to the splash; then, with an odd, sharp impulse, he turned his back. “You saved me.”

She wouldn’t deny it—on the contrary. “What a pity, now, I haven’t a daughter!”

On this he slowly came round again. “What should I do with her?”

“You’d treat her, I hope, better than you’ve treated Miss Prodmore.”

The young man positively coloured. “But I haven’t been bad——?”

The sight of this effect of her small joke produced on Mrs. Gracedew’s part an emotion less controllable than any she had yet felt. “Oh, you delightful goose!” she irrepressibly dropped.

She made his blush deepen, but the aggravation was a relief. “Of course—I’m all right, and there’s only one pity in the matter. I’ve nothing—nothing whatever, not a scrap of service nor a thing you’d care for—to offer you in compensation.”

She looked at him ever so kindly. “I’m not, as they say, ‘on the make.’” Never had he been put right with a lighter hand. “I didn’t do it for payment.”

“Then what did you do it for?”

For something, it might have seemed, as her eyes dropped and strayed, that had got brushed into a crevice of the old pavement. “Because I hated Mr. Prodmore.”

He conscientiously demurred. “So much as all that?”

“Oh, well,” she replied impatiently, “of course you also know how much I like the house. My hates and my likes,” she subtly explained, “can never live together. I get one of them out. The one this time was that man.”

He showed a candour of interest. “Yes—you got him out. Yes—I saw him go.” And his inner vision appeared to attend for some moments Mr. Prodmore’s departure. “But how did you do it?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Women——!” Mrs. Gracedew but vaguely sketched it.

A touch or two, however, for that subject, could of course almost always suffice. “Precisely—women. May I smoke again?” Clement Yule abruptly asked.

“Certainly. But I managed Mr. Prodmore,” she laughed as he re-lighted, “without cigarettes.”

Her companion puffed. “I couldn’t manage him.”

“So I saw!”

“I couldn’t get him out.”

“So he saw!”

Captain Yule, for a little, lost himself in his smoke. “Where is he gone?”

“I haven’t the least idea. But I meet him again,” she hastened to add—“very soon.”

“And when do you meet me?”

“Why, whenever you’ll come to see me.” For the twentieth time she gathered herself as if the words she had just spoken were quite her last hand. “At present, you see, I have a train to catch.”

Absorbed in the trivial act that engaged him, he gave her no help. “A train?”

“Surely. I didn’t walk.”

“No; but even trains——!” His eyes clung to her now. “You fly?”

“I try to. Good-bye.”

He had got between her and the door of departure quite as, on her attempt to quit him half an hour before, he had anticipated her approach to the stairs; and in this position he took no notice of her farewell. “I said just now that I had nothing to offer you. But of course I’ve the house itself.”

“The house?” She stared. “Why, I’ve got it?”

“Got it?”

“All in my head, I mean. That’s all I want.” She had not yet, save to Mr. Prodmore, made quite so light of it.

This had its action in his markedly longer face. “Why, I thought you loved it so!”

Ah, she was perfectly consistent. “I love it far too much to deprive you of it.”

Yet Clement Yule could in a fashion meet her. “Oh, it wouldn’t be depriving——!”

She altogether protested. “Not to turn you out——?”

“Dear lady, I’ve never been in!”

Oh, she was none the less downright. “You’re in now—I’ve put you, and you must stay.” He looked round so woefully, however, that she presently attenuated. “I don’t mean all the while, but long enough——!”

“Long enough for what?”

“For me to feel you’re here.”

“And how long will that take?”

“Well, you think me very fast—but sometimes I’m slow. I told you just now, at any rate,” she went on, “that I had arranged you should lose nothing. Is the very next thing I do, then, to make you lose everything?”

“It isn’t a question of what I lose,” the young man anxiously cried; “it’s a question of what I do! What have I done to find it all so plain?” Fate was really—fate reversed, improved, and unnatural—too much for him, and his heated young face showed honest stupefaction. “I haven’t lifted a finger. It’s you who have done all.”

“Yes, but if you’re just where you were before, how in the world are you saved?” She put it to him with still superior lucidity.

“By my life’s being my own again—to do what I want.”

“What you ‘want’”—Mrs. Gracedew’s handsome uplifted head had it all there, every inch of it—“is to keep your house.”

“Ah, but only,” he perfectly assented, “if, as you said, you find a way!”

“I have found a way—and there the way is: for me just simply not to touch the place. What you ‘want,’” she argued more closely, “is what made you give in to Prodmore. What you ‘want’ is these walls and these acres. What you ‘want’ is to take the way I first showed you.”

Her companion’s eyes, quitting for the purpose her face, looked to the quarter marked by her last words as at an horizon now remote. “Why, the way you first showed me was to marry Cora!”

She had to admit it, but as little as possible. “Practically—yes.”

“Well, it’s just ‘practically’ that I can’t!”

“I didn’t know that then,” said Mrs. Gracedew. “You didn’t tell me.”

He passed, with an approach to a grimace, his hand over the back of his head. “I felt a delicacy!”

“I didn’t even know that.” She spoke it almost sadly.

“It didn’t strike you that I might?”

She thought a moment. “No.” She thought again. “No. But don’t quarrel with me about it now!”

“Quarrel with you?” he looked amazement.

She laughed, but she had changed colour. “Cora, at any rate, felt no delicacy. Cora told me.”

Clement Yule fairly gaped. “Then she did know——?”

“She knew all; and if her father said she didn’t, he simply told you what was not.” She frankly gave him this, but the next minute, as if she had startled him more than she meant, she jumped to reassurance. “It was quite right of her. She would have refused you.”

The young man stared. “Oh!” He was quick, however, to show—by an amusement perhaps a trifle over-done—that he felt no personal wound. “Do you call that quite right?”

Mrs. Gracedew looked at it again. “For her—yes; and for Prodmore.”

“Oh, for Prodmore”—his laugh grew more grim—“with all my heart!”

This, then,—her kind eyes seemed to drop it upon him,—was all she meant. “To stay at your post—that was the way I showed you.”