COVERING END

I

At the foot of the staircase he waited and listened, thinking he had heard her call to him from the gallery, high aloft but out of view, to which he had allowed her independent access and whence indeed, on her first going up, the sound of her appreciation had reached him in rapid movements, evident rushes and dashes, and in droll, charming cries that echoed through the place. He had afterwards, expectant and restless, been, for another look, to the house-door, and then had fidgeted back into the hall, where her voice again caught him. It was many a day since such a voice had sounded in those empty chambers, and never perhaps, in all the years, for poor Chivers, had any voice at all launched a note so friendly and so free.

“Oh, no, mum, there ain’t no one whatever come yet. It’s quite all right, mum,—you can please yourself!” If he left her to range, all his pensive little economy seemed to say, wasn’t it just his poor pickings? He quitted the stairs, but stopped again, with his hand to his ear, as he heard her once more appeal to him. “Lots of lovely——? Lovely what, mum? Little ups and downs?” he quavered aloft. “Oh, as you say, mum: as many as in a poor man’s life!” She was clearly disposed, as she roamed in delight from point to point, to continue to talk, and, with his better ear and his scooped hand, he continued to listen hard. “‘Dear little crooked steps’? Yes, mum; please mind ’em, mum: they be cruel in the dark corners!” She appeared to take another of her light scampers, the sign of a fresh discovery and a fresh response; at which he felt his heart warm with the success of a trust of her that might after all have been rash. Once more her voice reached him and once more he gossiped back. “Coming up too? Not if you’ll kindly indulge me, mum—I must be where I can watch the bell. It takes watching as well as hearing!”—he dropped, as he resumed his round, to a murmur of great patience. This was taken up the next moment by the husky plaint of the signal itself, which seemed to confess equally to short wind and creaking joints. It moved, however, distinguishably, and its motion made him start much more as if he had been guilty of sleeping at his post than as if he had waited half the day. “Mercy, if I didn’t watch——!” He shuffled across the wide stone-paved hall and, losing himself beneath the great arch of the short passage to the entrance-front, hastened to admit his new visitor. He gives us thereby the use of his momentary absence for a look at the place he has left.

This is the central hall, high and square, brown and grey, flagged beneath and timbered above, of an old English country-house; an apartment in which a single survey is a perception of long and lucky continuities. It would have been difficult to find elsewhere anything at once so old and so actual, anything that had plainly come so far, far down without, at any moment of the endless journey, losing its way. To stand there and look round was to wonder a good deal—yet without arriving at an answer—whether it had been most neglected or most cherished; there was such resignation in its long survival and yet such bravery in its high polish. If it had never been spoiled, this was partly, no doubt, because it had been, for a century, given up; but what it had been given up to was, after all, homely and familiar use. It had in it at the present moment indeed much of the chill of fallen fortunes; but there was no concession in its humility and no hypocrisy in its welcome. It was magnificent and shabby, and the eyes of the dozen dark old portraits seemed, in their eternal attention, to count the cracks in the pavement, the rents in the seats of the chairs, and the missing tones in the Flemish tapestry. Above the tapestry, which, in its turn, was above the high oak wainscot, most of these stiff images—on the side on which it principally reigned—were placed; and they held up their heads to assure all comers that a tone or two was all that was missing, and that they had never waked up in winter dawns to any glimmer of bereavement, in the long night, of any relic or any feature. Such as it was, the company was all there; every inch of old oak, every yard of old arras, every object of ornament or of use to which these surfaces formed so rare a background. If the watchers on the walls had ever found a gap in their own rank, the ancient roof, of a certainty, would have been shaken by their collective gasp. As a matter of fact it was rich and firm—it had almost the dignity of the vault of a church. On this Saturday afternoon in August, a hot, still day, such of the casements as freely worked in the discoloured glass of the windows stood open in one quarter to a terrace that overlooked a park and in another to a wonderful old empty court that communicated with a wonderful old empty garden. The staircase, wide and straight, mounted, full in sight, to a landing that was half-way up; and on the right, as you faced this staircase, a door opened out of the brown panelling into a glimpse of a little morning-room, where, in a slanted, gilded light, there was brownness too, mixed with notes of old yellow. On the left, toward court and garden, another door stood open to the warm air. Still as you faced the staircase you had at your right, between that monument and the morning-room, the arch through which Chivers had disappeared.

His reappearance interrupts and yet in a manner, after all, quickens our intense impression; Chivers on the spot, and in this severe but spacious setting, was so perfect an image of immemorial domesticity. It would have been impossible perhaps, however, either to tell his age or to name his use: he was of the age of all the history that lurked in all the corners and of any use whatever you might be so good as still to find for him. Considerably shrunken and completely silvered, he had perpetual agreement in the droop of his kind white head and perpetual inquiry in the jerk of the idle old hands now almost covered by the sleeves of the black dress-coat which, twenty years before, must have been by a century or two the newest thing in the house and into which his years appeared to have declined very much as a shrunken family moves into a part of its habitation. This attire was completed by a white necktie that, in honour of the day, he himself had this morning done up. The humility he betrayed and the oddity he concealed were alike brought out by his juxtaposition with the gentleman he had admitted.

To admit Mr. Prodmore was anywhere and at any time, as you would immediately have recognised, an immense admission. He was a personage of great presence and weight, with a large smooth face in which a small sharp meaning was planted like a single pin in the tight red toilet-cushion of a guest-chamber. He wore a blue frock-coat and a stiff white waistcoat and a high white hat that he kept on his head with a kind of protesting cock, while in his buttonhole nestled a bold prize plant on which he occasionally lowered a proprietary eye that seemed to remind it of its being born to a public career. Mr. Prodmore’s appearance had evidently been thought out, but it might have struck you that the old portraits took it in with a sterner stare, with a fixedness indeed in which a visitor more sensitive would have read a consciousness of his remaining, in their presence, so jauntily, so vulgarly covered. He had never a glance for them, and it would have been easy after a minute to see that this was an old story between them. Their manner, as it were, sensibly increased the coolness. This coolness became a high rigour as Mr. Prodmore encountered, from the very threshold, a disappointment.

“No one here?” he indignantly demanded.

“I’m sorry to say no one has come, sir,” Chivers replied; “but I’ve had a telegram from Captain Yule.”

Mr. Prodmore’s apprehension flared out. “Not to say he ain’t coming?”

“He was to take the 2.20 from Paddington; he certainly should be here!” The old man spoke as if his non-arrival were the most unaccountable thing in the world, especially for a poor person ever respectful of the mystery of causes.

“He should have been here this hour or more. And so should my fly-away daughter!”

Chivers surrounded this description of Miss Prodmore with the deep discretion of silence, and then, after a moment, evidently reflected that silence, in a world bestrewn with traps to irreverence, might be as rash as speech. “Were they coming—a—together, sir?”

He had scarcely mended the matter, for his visitor gave an inconsequent stare. “Together?—for what do you take Miss Prodmore?” This young lady’s parent glared about him again as if to alight on something else that was out of place; but the good intentions expressed in the attitude of every object might presently have been presumed to soothe his irritation. It had at any rate the effect of bridging, for poor Chivers, some of his gaps. “It is in a sense true that their ‘coming together,’ as you call it, is exactly what I’ve made my plans for today: my calculation was that we should all punctually converge on this spot. Attended by her trusty maid, Miss Prodmore, who happens to be on a week’s visit to her grandmother at Bellborough, was to take the 1.40 from that place. I was to drive over—ten miles—from the most convenient of my seats. Captain Yule”—the speaker wound up his statement as with the mention of the last touch in a masterpiece of his own sketching—“was finally to shake off for a few hours the peculiar occupations that engage him.”

The old man listened with his head askance to favour his good ear, but his visible attention all on a sad spot in one of the half-dozen worn rugs. “They must be peculiar, sir, when a gentleman comes into a property like this and goes three months without so much as a nat’ral curiosity——! I don’t speak of anything but what is nat’ral, sir; but there have been people here——”

“There have repeatedly been people here!” Mr. Prodmore complacently interrupted.

“As you say, sir—to be shown over. With the master himself never shown!” Chivers dismally commented.

“He shall be, so that nobody can miss him!” Mr. Prodmore, for his own reassurance as well, hastened to retort.

His companion risked a tiny explanation. “It will be a mercy indeed to look on him; but I meant that he has not been taken round.”

“That’s what I meant too. I’ll take him—round and round: it’s exactly what I’ve come for!” Mr. Prodmore rang out; and his eyes made the lower circuit again, looking as pleased as such a pair of eyes could look with nobody as yet quite good enough either to terrify or to tickle. “He can’t fail to be affected, though he has been up to his neck in such a different class of thing.”

Chivers clearly wondered awhile what class of thing it could be. Then he expressed a timid hope. “In nothing, I dare say, but what’s right, sir——?”

“In everything,” Mr. Prodmore distinctly informed him, “that’s wrong! But here he is!” that gentleman added with elation as the doorbell again sounded. Chivers, under the double agitation of the appeal and the disclosure, proceeded to the front as fast as circumstances allowed; while Mr. Prodmore, left alone, would have been observed—had not his solitude been so bleak—to recover a degree of cheerfulness. Cheerfulness in solitude at Covering End was certainly not irresistible, but particular feelings and reasons had pitched, for their campaign, the starched, if now somewhat ruffled, tent of his large white waistcoat. If they had issued audibly from that pavilion, they would have represented to us his consciousness of the reinforcement he might bring up for attack should Captain Yule really resist the house. The sound he next heard from the front caused him none the less, for that matter, to articulate a certain drop. “Only Cora?—Well,” he added in a tone somewhat at variance with his “only,” “he shan’t, at any rate, resist her!” This announcement would have quickened a spectator’s interest in the young lady whom Chivers now introduced and followed, a young lady who straightway found herself the subject of traditionary discipline. “I’ve waited. What do you mean?”

Cora Prodmore, who had a great deal of colour in her cheeks and a great deal more—a bold variety of kinds—in the extremely high pitch of her new, smart clothes, meant, on the whole, it was easy to see, very little, and met this challenge with still less show of support either from the sources I have mentioned or from any others. A dull, fresh, honest, overdressed damsel of two-and-twenty, she was too much out of breath, too much flurried and frightened, to do more than stammer: “Waited, papa? Oh, I’m sorry!”

Her regret appeared to strike her father still more as an impertinence than as a vanity. “Would you then, if I had not had patience for you, have wished not to find me? Why the dickens are you so late?”

Agitated, embarrassed, the girl was at a loss. “I’ll tell you, papa!” But she followed up her pledge with an air of vacuity and then, dropping into the nearest seat, simply closed her eyes to her danger. If she desired relief, she had caught at the one way to get it. “I feel rather faint. Could I have some tea?”

Mr. Prodmore considered both the idea and his daughter’s substantial form. “Well, as I shall expect you to put forth all your powers—yes!” He turned to Chivers. “Some tea.”

The old man’s eyes had attached themselves to Miss Prodmore’s symptoms with more solicitude than those of her parent. “I did think it might be required!” Then as he gained the door of the morning-room: “I’ll lay it out here.”

The young lady, on his withdrawal, recovered herself sufficiently to rise again. “It was my train, papa—so very awfully behind. I walked up, you know, also, from the station—there’s such a lovely footpath across the park.”

“You’ve been roaming the country then alone?” Mr. Prodmore inquired.

The girl protested with instant eagerness against any such picture. “Oh, dear no, not alone!” She spoke, absurdly, as if she had had a train of attendants; but it was an instant before she could complete the assurance. “There were ever so many people about.”

“Nothing is more possible than that there should be too many!” said her father, speaking as for his personal convenience, but presenting that as enough. “But where, among them all,” he demanded, “is your trusty maid?”

Cora’s reply made up in promptitude what it lacked in felicity. “I didn’t bring her.” She looked at the old portraits as if to appeal to them to help her to remember why. Apparently indeed they gave a sign, for she presently went on: “She was so extremely unwell.”

Mr. Prodmore met this with reprobation. “Wasn’t she to understand from the first that we don’t permit——”

“Anything of that sort?”—the girl recalled it at least as a familiar law. “Oh, yes, papa—I thought she did.”

“But she doesn’t?”—Mr. Prodmore pressed the point. Poor Cora, at a loss again, appeared to wonder if the point had better be a failure of brain or of propriety, but her companion continued to press. “What on earth’s the matter with her?”

She again communed with their silent witnesses. “I really don’t quite know, but I think that at Granny’s she eats too much.”

“I’ll soon put an end to that!” Mr. Prodmore returned with decision. “You expect then to pursue your adventures quite into the night—to return to Bellborough as you came?”

The girl had by this time begun a little to find her feet. “Exactly as I came, papa dear,—under the protection of a new friend I’ve just made, a lady whom I met in the train and who is also going back by the 6.19. She was, like myself, on her way to this place, and I expected to find her here.”

Mr. Prodmore chilled on the spot any such expectations. “What does she want at this place?”

Cora was clearly stronger for her new friend than for herself. “She wants to see it.”

Mr. Prodmore reflected on this complication. “Today?” It was practically presumptuous. “Today won’t do.”

“So I suggested,” the girl declared. “But do you know what she said?”

“How should I know,” he coldly demanded, “what a nobody says?”

But on this, as if with the returning taste of a new strength, his daughter could categorically meet him. “She’s not a nobody. She’s an American.”

Mr. Prodmore, for a moment, was struck: he embraced the place, instinctively, in a flash of calculation. “An American?”

“Yes, and she’s wild——”

He knew all about that. “Americans mostly are!”

“I mean,” said Cora, “to see this place. ‘Wild’ was what she herself called it—and I think she also said she was ‘mad.’”

“She gave”—Mr. Prodmore reviewed the affair—“a fine account of herself! But she won’t do.”

The effect of her new acquaintance on his companion had been such that she could, after an instant, react against this sentence. “Well, when I told her that this particular day perhaps wouldn’t, she said it would just have to.”

“Have to do?” Mr. Prodmore showed again, through a chink, his speculative eye. “For what, then, with such grand airs?”

“Why, I suppose, for what Americans want.”

He measured the quantity. “They want everything.”

“Then I wonder,” said Cora, “that she hasn’t arrived.”

“When she does arrive,” he answered, “I’ll tackle her; and I shall thank you, in future, not to take up, in trains, with indelicate women of whom you know nothing.”

“Oh, I did know something,” his daughter pleaded; “for I saw her yesterday at Bellborough.”

Mr. Prodmore contested even this freedom. “And what was she doing at Bellborough?”

“Staying at the Blue Dragon, to see the old abbey. She says she just loves old abbeys. It seems to be the same feeling,” the girl went on, “that brought her over, today, to see this old house.”

“She ‘just loves’ old houses? Then why the deuce didn’t she accompany you properly, since she is so pushing, to the door?”

“Because she went off in a fly,” Cora explained, “to see, first, the old hospital. She just loves old hospitals. She asked me if this isn’t a show-house. I told her”—the girl was anxious to disclaim responsibility—“that I hadn’t the least idea.”

“It is!” Mr. Prodmore cried almost with ferocity. “I wonder, on such a speech, what she thought of you!”

Miss Prodmore meditated with distinct humbleness. “I know. She told me.”

He had looked her up and down. “That you’re really a hopeless frump?”

Cora, oddly enough, seemed almost to court this description. “That I’m not, as she rather funnily called it, a show-girl.”

“Think of your having to be reminded—by the very strangers you pick up,” Mr. Prodmore groaned, “of what my daughter should pre-eminently be! Your friend, all the same,” he bethought himself, “is evidently loud.”

“Well, when she comes,” the girl again so far agreed as to reply, “you’ll certainly hear her. But don’t judge her, papa, till you do. She’s tremendously clever,” she risked—“there seems to be nothing she doesn’t know.”

“And there seems to be nothing you do! You’re not tremendously clever,” Mr. Prodmore pursued; “so you’ll permit me to demand of you a slight effort of intelligence.” Then, as for the benefit of the listening walls themselves, he struck the high note. “I’m expecting Captain Yule.”

Cora’s consciousness blinked. “The owner of this property?”

Her father’s tone showed his reserves. “That’s what it depends on you to make him!”

“On me?” the girl gasped.

“He came into it three months ago by the death of his great-uncle, who had lived to ninety-three, but who, having quarrelled mortally with his father, had always refused to receive either sire or son.”

Our young lady bent her eyes on this page of family history, then raised them but dimly lighted. “But now, at least, doesn’t he live here?”

“So little,” her companion replied, “that he comes here today for the very first time. I’ve some business to discuss with him that can best be discussed on this spot; and it’s a vital part of that business that you too should take pains to make him welcome.”

Miss Prodmore failed to ignite. “In his own house?”

“That it’s not his own house is just the point I seek to make! The way I look at it is that it’s my house! The way I look at it even, my dear”—in his demonstration of his ways of looking Mr. Prodmore literally expanded—“is that it’s our house. The whole thing is mortgaged, as it stands, for every penny of its value; and I’m in the pleasant position—do you follow me?” he trumpeted.

Cora jumped. “Of holding the mortgages?”

He caught her with a smile of approval and indeed of surprise. “You keep up with me better than I hoped. I hold every scrap of paper, and it’s a precious collection.”

She smothered, perceptibly, a vague female sigh, glancing over the place more attentively than she had yet done. “Do you mean that you can come down on him?”

“I don’t need to ‘come,’ my dear—I am ‘down.’ This is down!”—and the iron point of Mr. Prodmore’s stick fairly struck, as he rapped it, a spark from the cold pavement. “I came many weeks ago—commercially speaking—and haven’t since budged from the place.”

The girl moved a little about the hall, then turned with a spasm of courage. “Are you going to be very hard?”

If she read the eyes with which he met her she found in them, in spite of a certain accompanying show of pleasantry, her answer. “Hard with you?”

“No—that doesn’t matter. Hard with the Captain.”

Mr. Prodmore thought an instant. “‘Hard’ is a stupid, shuffling term. What do you mean by it?”

“Well, I don’t understand business,” Cora said; “but I think I understand you, papa, enough to gather that you’ve got, as usual, a striking advantage.”

“As usual, I have scored; but my advantage won’t be striking perhaps till I have sent the blow home. What I appeal to you, as a father, at present to do”—he continued broadly to demonstrate—“is to nerve my arm. I look to you to see me through.”

“Through what, then?”

“Through this most important transaction. Through the speculation of which you’ve been the barely dissimulated subject. I’ve brought you here to receive an impression, and I’ve brought you, even more, to make one.”

The girl turned honestly flat. “But on whom?”

“On me, to begin with—by not being a fool. And then, Miss, on him.”

Erect, but as if paralysed, she had the air of facing the worst. “On Captain Yule?”

“By bringing him to the point.”

“But, father,” she asked in evident anguish—“to what point?”

“The point where a gentleman has to.”

Miss Prodmore faltered. “Go down on his knees?”

Her father considered. “No—they don’t do that now.”

“What do they do?”

Mr. Prodmore carried his eyes with a certain sustained majesty to a remote point. “He will know himself.”

“Oh, no, indeed, he won’t,” the girl cried; “they don’t ever!”

“Then the sooner they learn—whoever teaches ’em!—the better: the better I mean in particular,” Mr. Prodmore added with an intention discernibly vicious, “for the master of this house. I’ll guarantee that he shall understand that,” he concluded, “for I shall do my part.”

She looked at him as if his part were really to be hated. “But how on earth, sir, can I ever do mine? To begin with, you know, I’ve never even seen him.”

Mr. Prodmore took out his watch; then, having consulted it, put it back with a gesture that seemed to dispose at the same time and in the same manner of the objection. “You’ll see him now—from one moment to the other. He’s remarkably handsome, remarkably young, remarkably ambitious, and remarkably clever. He has one of the best and oldest names in this part of the country—a name that, far and wide here, one could do so much with that I’m simply indignant to see him do so little. I propose, my dear, to do with it all he hasn’t, and I further propose, to that end, first to get hold of it. It’s you, Miss Prodmore, who shall take it out of the fire.”

“The fire?”—he had terrible figures.

“Out of the mud, if you prefer. You must pick it up, do you see? My plan is, in short,” Mr. Prodmore pursued, “that when we’ve brushed it off and rubbed it down a bit, blown away the dust and touched up the rust, my daughter shall gracefully bear it.”

She could only oppose, now, a stiff, thick transparency that yielded a view of the course in her own veins, after all, however, mingled with a feebler fluid, of the passionate blood of the Prodmores. “And pray is it also Captain Yule’s plan?”

Her father’s face warned her off the ground of irony, but he replied without violence. “His plans have not yet quite matured. But nothing is more natural,” he added with an ominous smile, “than that they shall do so on the sunny south wall of Miss Prodmore’s best manner.”

Miss Prodmore’s spirit was visibly rising, and a note that might have meant warning for warning sounded in the laugh produced by this sally. “You speak of them, papa, as if they were sour little plums! You exaggerate, I think, the warmth of Miss Prodmore’s nature. It has always been thought remarkably cold.”

“Then you’ll be so good, my dear, as to confound—it mightn’t be amiss even a little to scandalise—that opinion. I’ve spent twenty years in giving you what your poor mother used to call advantages, and they’ve cost me hundreds and hundreds of pounds. It’s now time that, both as a parent and as a man of business, I should get my money back. I couldn’t help your temper,” Mr. Prodmore conceded, “nor your taste, nor even your unfortunate resemblance to the estimable, but far from ornamental, woman who brought you forth; but I paid out a small fortune that you should have, damn you, don’t you know? a good manner. You never show it to me, certainly; but do you mean to tell me that, at this time of day—for other persons—you haven’t got one?”

This pulled our young lady perceptibly up; there was a directness in the argument that was like the ache of old pinches. “If you mean by ‘other persons’ persons who are particularly civil—well, Captain Yule may not see his way to be one of them. He may not think—don’t you see?—that I’ve a good manner.”

“Do your duty, Miss, and never mind what he thinks!” Her father’s conception of her duty momentarily sharpened. “Don’t look at him like a sick turkey, and he’ll be sure to think right.”

The colour that sprang into Cora’s face at this rude comparison was such, unfortunately, as perhaps a little to justify it. Yet she retained, in spite of her emotion, some remnant of presence of mind. “I remember your saying once, some time ago, that that was just what he would be sure not to do: I mean when he began to go in for his dreadful ideas——”

Mr. Prodmore took her boldly up. “About the ‘radical programme,’ the ‘social revolution,’ the spoliation of everyone, and the destruction of everything? Why, you stupid thing, I’ve worked round to a complete agreement with him. The taking from those who have by those who haven’t——”

“Well?” said the girl, with some impatience, as he sought the right way of expressing his notion.

“What is it but to receive, from consenting hands, the principal treasure of the rich? If I’m rich, my daughter is my largest property, and I freely make her over. I shall, in other words, forgive my young friend his low opinions if he renounces them for you.”

Cora, at this, started as with a glimpse of delight. “He won’t renounce them! He shan’t!”

Her father appeared still to enjoy the ingenious way he had put it, so that he had good humour to spare. “If you suggest that you’re in political sympathy with him, you mean then that you’ll take him as he is?”

“I won’t take him at all!” she protested with her head very high; but she had no sooner uttered the words than the sound of the approach of wheels caused her dignity to drop. “A fly?—it must be he!” She turned right and left, for a retreat or an escape, but her father had already caught her by the wrist. “Surely,” she pitifully panted, “you don’t want me to bounce on him thus?”

Mr. Prodmore, as he held her, estimated the effect. “Your frock won’t do—with what it cost me?”

“It’s not my frock, papa,—it’s his thinking I’ve come here for him to see me!”

He let her go and, as she moved away, had another look for the social value of the view of her stout back. It appeared to determine him, for, with a touch of mercy, he passed his word. “He doesn’t think it, and he shan’t know it.”

The girl had made for the door of the morning-room, before reaching which she flirted breathlessly round. “But he knows you want me to hook him!”

Mr. Prodmore was already in the parliamentary attitude the occasion had suggested to him for the reception of his visitor. “The way to ‘hook’ him will be not to be hopelessly vulgar. He doesn’t know that you know anything.” The house-bell clinked, and he waved his companion away. “Await us there with tea, and mind you toe the mark!”

Chivers, at this moment, summoned by the bell, reappeared in the morning-room doorway, and Cora’s dismay brushed him as he sidled past her and off into the passage to the front. Then, from the threshold of her refuge, she launched a last appeal. “Don’t kill me, father: give me time!” With which she dashed into the room, closing the door with a bang.

II

Mr. Prodmore, in Chivers’s absence, remained staring as if at a sudden image of something rather fine. His child had left with him the sense of a quick irradiation, and he failed to see why, at the worst, such lightnings as she was thus able to dart shouldn’t strike somewhere. If he had spoken to her of her best manner perhaps that was her best manner. He heard steps and voices, however, and immediately invited to his aid his own, which was simply magnificent. Chivers, returning, announced solemnly “Captain Yule!” and ushered in a tall young man in a darkish tweed suit and a red necktie, attached in a sailor’s knot, who, as he entered, removed a soft brown hat. Mr. Prodmore, at this, immediately saluted him by uncovering. “Delighted at last to see you here!”

It was the young man who first, in his comparative simplicity, put out a hand. “If I’ve not come before, Mr. Prodmore, it was—very frankly speaking—from the dread of seeing you!” His speech contradicted, to some extent, his gesture, but Clement Yule’s was an aspect in which contradictions were rather remarkably at home. Erect and slender, but as strong as he was straight, he was set up, as the phrase is, like a soldier, and yet finished, in certain details—matters of expression and suggestion only indeed—like a man in whom sensibility had been recklessly cultivated. He was hard and fine, just as he was sharp and gentle, just as he was frank and shy, just as he was serious and young, just as he looked, though you could never have imitated it, distinctly “kept up” and yet considerably reduced. His features were thoroughly regular, but his complete shaving might have been designed to show that they were, after all, not absurd. The face Mr. Prodmore offered him fairly glowed, on this new showing, with instant pride of possession, and there was that in Captain Yule’s whole air which justified such a sentiment without consciously rewarding it.

“Ah, surely,” said the elder man, “my presence is not without a motive!”

“It’s just the motive,” Captain Yule returned, “that makes me wince at it! Certainly I’ve no illusions,” he added, “about the ground of our meeting. Your thorough knowledge of what you’re about has placed me at your mercy—you hold me in the hollow of your hand.”

It was vivid in every inch that Mr. Prodmore’s was a nature to expand in the warmth, or even in the chill, of any tribute to his financial subtlety. “Well, I won’t, on my side, deny that when, in general, I go in deep I don’t go in for nothing. I make it pay double!” he smiled.

“You make it pay so well—‘double’ surely doesn’t do you justice!—that, if I’ve understood you, you can do quite as you like with this preposterous place. Haven’t you brought me down exactly that I may see you do it?”

“I’ve certainly brought you down that you may open your eyes!” This, apparently, however, was not what Mr. Prodmore himself had arrived to do with his own. These fine points of expression literally contracted with intensity. “Of course, you know, you can always clear the property. You can pay off the mortgages.”

Captain Yule, by this time, had, as he had not done at first, looked up and down, round about and well over the scene, taking in, though at a mere glance, it might have seemed, more particularly, the row, high up, of strenuous ancestors. But Mr. Prodmore’s last words rang none the less on his ear, and he met them with mild amusement. “Pay off——? What can I pay off with?”

“You can always raise money.”

“What can I raise it on?”

Mr. Prodmore looked massively gay. “On your great political future.”

“Oh, I’ve not taken—for the short run at least—the lucrative line,” the young man said, “and I know what you think of that.”

Mr. Prodmore’s blandness confessed, by its instant increase, to this impeachment. There was always the glory of intimacy in Yule’s knowing what he thought. “I hold that you keep, in public, very dangerous company; but I also hold that you’re extravagant mainly because you’ve nothing at stake. A man has the right opinions,” he developed with pleasant confidence, “as soon as he has something to lose by having the wrong. Haven’t I already hinted to you how to set your political house in order? You drop into the lower regions because you keep the best rooms empty. You’re a firebrand, in other words my dear Captain, simply because you’re a bachelor. That’s one of the early complaints we all pass through, but it’s soon over, and the treatment for it quite simple. I have your remedy.”

The young man’s eyes, wandering again about the house, might have been those of an auditor of the fiddling before the rise of the curtain. “A remedy worse than the disease?”

“There’s nothing worse, that I’ve ever heard of,” Mr. Prodmore sharply replied, “than your particular fix. Least of all a heap of gold——”

“A heap of gold?” His visitor idly settled, as if the curtain were going up.

Mr. Prodmore raised it bravely. “In the lap of a fine fresh lass! Give pledges to fortune, as somebody says—then we’ll talk. You want money—that’s what you want. Well, marry it!”

Clement Yule, for a little, never stirred, save that his eyes yet again strayed vaguely. At last they stopped with a smile. “Of course I could do that in a moment!”

“It’s even just my own danger from you,” his companion returned. “I perfectly recognise that any woman would now jump——”

“I don’t like jumping women,” Captain Yule threw in; “but that perhaps is a detail. It’s more to the point that I’ve yet to see the woman whom, by an advance of my own——”

“You’d care to keep in the really attractive position——?”

“Which can never, of course, be anything”—Yule took his friend up again—“but that of waiting quietly.”

“Never, never anything!” Mr. Prodmore, most assentingly, banished all other thought. “But I haven’t asked you, you know, to make an advance.”

“You’ve only asked me to receive one?”

Mr. Prodmore waited a little. “Well, I’ve asked you—I asked you a month ago—to think it all over.”

“I have thought it all over,” Clement Yule said; “and the strange sequel seems to be that my eyes have got accustomed to my darkness. I seem to make out, in the gloom of my meditations, that, at the worst, I can let the whole thing slide.”

“The property?”—Mr. Prodmore jerked back as if it were about to start.

“Isn’t it the property,” his visitor inquired, “that positively throws me up? If I can afford neither to live on it nor to disencumber it, I can at least let it save its own bacon and pay its own debts. I can say to you simply: ‘Take it, my dear sir, and the devil take you!’”

Mr. Prodmore gave a quick, strained smile. “You wouldn’t be so shockingly rude!”

“Why not—if I’m a firebrand and a keeper of low company and a general nuisance? Sacrifice for sacrifice, that might very well be the least!”

This was put with such emphasis that Mr. Prodmore was for a moment arrested. He could stop very short, however, and yet talk as still going. “How do you know, if you haven’t compared them? It’s just to make the comparison—in all the proper circumstances—that you’re here at this hour.” He took, with a large, though vague, exhibitory gesture, a few turns about. “Now that you stretch yourself—for an hour’s relaxation and rocked, as it were, by my friendly hand—in the ancient cradle of your race, can you seriously entertain the idea of parting with such a venerable family relic?”

It was evident that, as he decorously embraced the scene, the young man, in spite of this dissuasive tone, was entertaining ideas. It might have appeared at the moment to a spectator in whom fancy was at all alert that the place, becoming in a manner conscious of the question, felt itself on its honour, and that its honour could make no compromise. It met Clement Yule with no grimace of invitation, with no attenuation of its rich old sadness. It was as if the two hard spirits, the grim genius loci and the quick modern conscience, stood an instant confronted. “The cradle of my race bears, for me, Mr. Prodmore, a striking resemblance to its tomb.” The sigh that dropped from him, however, was not quite void of tenderness. It might, for that matter, have been a long, sad creak, portending collapse, of some immemorial support of the Yules. “Heavens, how melancholy——!”

Mr. Prodmore, somewhat ambiguously, took up the sound. “Melancholy?”—he just balanced. That well might be, even a little should be—yet agreement might depreciate.

“Musty, mouldy;” then with a poke of his stick at a gap in the stuff with which an old chair was covered, “mangy!” Captain Yule responded. “Is this the character throughout?”

Mr. Prodmore fixed a minute the tell-tale tatter. “You must judge for yourself—you must go over the house.” He hesitated again; then his indecision vanished—the right line was clear. “It does look a bit run down, but I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll do it up for you—neatly: I’ll throw that in!”

His young friend turned on him an eye that, though markedly enlivened by his offer, was somehow only the more inscrutable. “Will you put in the electric light?”

Mr. Prodmore’s own twinkle—at this touch of a spring he had not expected to work—was, on the other hand, temporarily veiled. “Well, if you’ll meet me half-way! We’re dealing here”—he backed up his gravity—“with fancy-values. Don’t you feel,” he appealed, “as you take it all in, a kind of a something-or-other down your back?”

Clement Yule gazed awhile at one of the pompous quarterings in the faded old glass that, in tones as of late autumn, crowned with armorial figures the top of the great hall-window; then with abruptness he turned away. “Perhaps I don’t take it all in; but what I do feel is—since you mention it—a sort of stiffening of the spine! The whole thing is too queer—too cold—too cruel.”

“Cruel?”—Mr. Prodmore’s demur was virtuous.

“Like the face of some stuck-up distant relation who won’t speak first. I see in the stare of the old dragon, I taste in his very breath, all the helpless mortality he has tucked away!”

“Lord, sir—you have fancies!” Mr. Prodmore was almost scandalised.

But the young man’s fancies only multiplied as he moved, not at all critical, but altogether nervous, from object to object. “I don’t know what’s the matter—but there is more here than meets the eye.” He tried as for his amusement or his relief to figure it out. “I miss the old presences. I feel the old absences. I hear the old voices. I see the old ghosts.”

This last was a profession that offered some common ground. “The old ghosts, Captain Yule,” his companion promptly replied, “are worth so much a dozen, and with no reduction, I must remind you—with the price indeed rather raised—for the quantity taken!” Feeling then apparently that he had cleared the air a little by this sally, Mr. Prodmore proceeded to pat his interlocutor on a back that he by no means wished to cause to be put to the wall. “Look about you, at any rate, a little more.” He crossed with his toes well out the line that divides encouragement from patronage. “Do make yourself at home.”

“Thank you very much, Mr. Prodmore. May I light a cigarette?” his visitor asked.

“In your own house, Captain?”

“That’s just the question: it seems so much less my own house than before I had come into it!” The Captain offered Mr. Prodmore a cigarette which that gentleman, also taking a light from him, accepted; then he lit his own and began to smoke. “As I understand you,” he went on, “you lump your two conditions? I mean I must accept both or neither?”

Mr. Prodmore threw back his shoulders with a high recognition of the long stride represented by this question. “You will accept both, for, by doing so, you’ll clear the property at a stroke. The way I put it is—see?—that if you’ll stand for Gossage, you’ll get returned for Gossage.”

“And if I get returned for Gossage, I shall marry your daughter. Accordingly,” the young man pursued, “if I marry your daughter——”

“I’ll burn up, before your eyes,” said this young lady’s proprietor, “every scratch of your pen. It will be a bonfire of signatures. There won’t be a penny to pay—there’ll only be a position to take. You’ll take it with peculiar grace.”

“Peculiar, Mr. Prodmore—very!”

The young man had assented more than he desired, but he was not deterred by it from completing the picture. “You’ll settle down here in comfort and honour.”

Clement Yule took several steps; the effect of his host was the reverse of soothing; yet the latter watched his irritation as if it were the working of a charm. “Are you very sure of the ‘honour’ if I turn my political coat?”

“You’ll only be turning it back again to the way it was always worn. Gossage will receive you with open arms and press you to a heaving Tory bosom. That bosom”—Mr. Prodmore followed himself up—“has never heaved but to sound Conservative principles. The cradle, as I’ve called it,—or at least the rich, warm coverlet,—of your race, Gossage was the political property, so to speak, of generations of your family. Stand therefore in the good old interest and you’ll stand like a lion.”

“I’m afraid you mean,” Captain Yule laughed, “that I must first roar like one.”

“Oh, I’ll do the roaring!”—and Mr. Prodmore shook his mane. “Leave that to me.”

“Then why the deuce don’t you stand yourself?”

Mr. Prodmore knew so familiarly why! “Because I’m not a remarkably handsome young man with the grand old home and the right old name. Because I’m a different sort of matter altogether. But if I haven’t these advantages,” he went on, “you’ll do justice to my natural desire that my daughter at least shall have them.”

Clement Yule watched himself smoke a minute. “Doing justice to natural desires is just what, of late, I’ve tried to make a study of. But I confess I don’t quite grasp the deep attraction you appear to discover in so large a surrender of your interests.”

“My surrenders are my own affair,” Mr. Prodmore rang out, “and as for my interests, as I never, on principle, give anything for nothing, I dare say I may be trusted to know them when I see them. You come high—I don’t for a moment deny it; but when I look at you, in this pleasant, intimate way, my dear boy—if you’ll allow me so to describe things—I recognise one of those cases, unmistakeable when really met, in which one must put down one’s money. There’s not an article in the whole shop, if you don’t mind the comparison, that strikes me as better value. I intend you shall be, Captain,” Mr. Prodmore wound up in a frank, bold burst, “the true comfort of my life!”

The young man was as hushed for a little as if an organ-tone were still in the air. “May I inquire,” he at last returned, “if Miss Prodmore’s ideas of comfort are as well defined—and in her case, I may add, as touchingly modest—as her father’s? Is she a responsible party of this ingenious arrangement?”

Mr. Prodmore rendered homage—his appreciation was marked—to the elevated character of his young friend’s scruple. “Miss Prodmore, Captain Yule, may be perhaps best described as a large smooth sheet of blank, though gilt-edged, paper. No image of any tie but the true and perfect filial has yet, I can answer for it, formed itself on the considerable expanse. But for that image to be projected——”

“I’ve only, in person, to appear?” Yule asked with an embarrassment that he tried to laugh off.

“And, naturally, in person,” Mr. Prodmore intelligently assented, “do yourself, as well as the young lady, justice. Do you remember what you said when I first, in London, laid the matter before you?”

Clement Yule did remember, but his amusement increased. “I think I said it struck me I should first take a look at—what do you call it?—the corpus delicti.”

“You should first see for yourself what you had really come into? I was not only eager for that,” said Mr. Prodmore, “but I’m willing to go further: I’m quite ready to hear you say that you think you should also first see the young lady.”

Captain Yule continued to laugh. “There is something in that then, since you mention it!”

“I think you’ll find that there’s everything.” Mr. Prodmore again looked at his watch. “Which will you take first?”

“First?”

“The young lady or the house?”

His companion, at this, unmistakeably started. “Do you mean your daughter’s here?”

Mr. Prodmore glowed with consciousness. “In the morning-room.”

“Waiting for me?”

The tone showed a consternation that Mr. Prodmore’s was alert to soothe. “Ah, as long, you know, as you like!”

Yule’s alarm, however, was not assuaged; it appeared to grow as he stared, much discomposed, yet sharply thinking, at the door to which his friend had pointed. “Oh, longer than this, please!” Then as he turned away: “Do you mean she knows——?”

“That she’s here on view?” Mr. Prodmore hung fire a moment, but was equal to the occasion. “She knows nothing whatever. She’s as unconscious as the rose on its stem!”

His companion was visibly relieved. “That’s right—let her remain so! I’ll first take the house,” said Clement Yule.

“Shall I go round with you?” Mr. Prodmore asked.

The young man’s reflection was brief. “Thank you. I’d rather, on the whole, go round alone.”

The old servant who had admitted the gentlemen came back at this crisis from the morning-room, looking from under a bent brow and with much limpid earnestness from one of them to the other. The one he first addressed had evidently, though quite unaware of it, inspired him with a sympathy from which he now took a hint. “There’s tea on, sir!” he persuasively jerked as he passed the younger man.

The elder answered. “Then I’ll join my daughter.” He gained the morning-room door, whence he repeated with an appropriate gesture—that of offering proudly, with light, firm fingers, a flower of his own celebrated raising—his happy formula of Miss Prodmore’s state. “The rose on its stem!” Scattering petals, diffusing fragrance, he thus passed out.

Chivers, meanwhile, had rather pointlessly settled once more in its place some small object that had not strayed; to whom Clement Yule, absently watching him, abruptly broke out. “I say, my friend, what colour is the rose?”

The old man looked up with a dimness that presently glimmered. “The rose, sir?” He turned to the open door and the shining day. “Rather a brilliant——”

“A brilliant——?” Yule was interested.

“Kind of old-fashioned red.” Chivers smiled with the pride of being thus able to testify, but the next instant his smile went out. “It’s the only one left—on the old west wall.”

His visitor’s mirth, at this, quickly enough revived. “My dear fellow, I’m not alluding to the sole ornament of the garden, but to the young lady at present in the morning-room. Do you happen to have noticed if she’s pretty?”

Chivers stood queerly rueful. “Laws, sir—it’s a matter I mostly notice; but isn’t it, at the same time, sir, a matter—like—of taste?”

“Pre-eminently. That’s just why I appeal with such confidence to yours.”

The old man acknowledged with a flush of real embarrassment a responsibility he had so little invited. “Well, sir,—mine was always a sort of fancy for something more merry-like.”

“She isn’t merry-like then, poor Miss Prodmore?” Captain Yule’s attention, however, dropped before the answer came, and he turned off the subject with an “Ah, if you come to that, neither am I! But it doesn’t signify,” he went on. “What are you?” he more sociably demanded.

Chivers clearly had to think a bit. “Well, sir, I’m not quite that. Whatever has there been to make me, sir?” he asked in dim extenuation.

“How in the world do I know? I mean to whom do you belong?”

Chivers seemed to scan impartially the whole field. “If you could just only tell me, sir! I quite seem to waste away—for someone to take an order of.”

Clement Yule, by this time, had become aware he was amusing. “Who pays your wages?”

“No one at all, sir,” said the old man very simply.

His friend, fumbling an instant in a waistcoat pocket, produced something that his hand, in obedience to a little peremptory gesture and by a trick of which he had unlearned, through scant custom, the neatness, though the propriety was instinctive, placed itself in a shy practical relation to. “Then there’s a sovereign. And I haven’t many!” the young man, turning away resignedly, threw after it.

Chivers, for an instant, intensely studied him. “Ah, then, shouldn’t it stay in the family?”

Clement Yule wheeled round, first struck, then, at the sight of the figure made by his companion in this offer, visibly touched. “I think it does, old boy.”

Chivers kept his eyes on him now. “I’ve served your house, sir.”

“How long?”

“All my life.”

So, for a time, they faced each other, and something in Chivers made Yule at last speak. “Then I won’t give you up!”

“Indeed, sir, I hope you won’t give up anything.”

The Captain took up his hat. “It remains to be seen.” He looked over the place again; his eyes wandered to the open door. “Is that the garden?”

“It was!”—and the old man’s sigh was like the creak of the wheel of time. “Shall I show you how it used to be?”

“It’s just as it is, alas, that I happen to require it!” Captain Yule reached the door and stood looking beyond. “Don’t come,” he then said; “I want to think.” With which he walked out.

Chivers, left alone, appeared to wonder at it, and his wonder, like that of most old people, lay near his lips. “What does he want, poor dear, to think about?” This speculation, however, was immediately checked by a high, clear voice that preceded the appearance on the stairs, before she had reached the middlemost landing, of the wonderful figure of a lady, a lady who, with the almost trumpeted cheer of her peremptory but friendly call—“Housekeeper, Butler, old Family Servant!”—fairly waked the sleeping echoes. Chivers gazed up at her in quick remembrance, half dismayed, half dazzled, of a duty neglected. She appeared now; she shone at him out of the upper dusk; reaching the middle, she had begun to descend, with beautiful laughter and rustling garments; and though she was alone she gave him the sense of coming in a crowd and with music. “Oh, I should have told him of her!”

III

She was indeed an apparition, a presence requiring announcement and explanation just in the degree in which it seemed to show itself in a relation quite of its own to all social preliminaries. It evidently either assumed them to be already over or wished to forestall them altogether; what was clear at any rate was that it allowed them scant existence. She was young, tall, radiant, lovely, and dressed in a manner determined at once, obviously, by the fact and by the humour of her journey—it might have proclaimed her so a pilgrim or so set her up as a priestess. Most journeys, for this lady, at all events, were clearly a brush of Paris. “Did you think I had got snapped down in an old box like that poor girl—what’s her name? the one who was poking round too—in the celebrated poem? You dear, delightful man, why didn’t you tell me?”

“Tell you, mum——?”

“Well, that you’re so perfectly—perfect! You’re ever so much better than anyone has ever said. Why, in the name of common sense, has nobody ever said anything? You’re everything in the world you ought to be, and not the shade of a shade of anything you oughtn’t!”

It was a higher character to be turned out with than poor Chivers had ever dreamed. “Well, mum, I try!” he gaped.

“Oh, no, you don’t—that’s just your charm! I try,” cried his friend, “but you do nothing: here you simply are—you can’t help it!”

He stood overwhelmed. “Me, mum?”

She took him in at the eyes—she could take everything at once. “Yes, you too, you positive old picture! I’ve seen the old masters—but you’re the old master!”

“The master—I?” He fairly fell back.

“‘The good and faithful servant’—Rembrandt van Rhyn: with three stars. That’s what you are!” Nothing would have been more droll to a spectator than her manner of meeting his humbleness, or more charming indeed than the practical sweetness of her want of imagination of it. “The house is a vision of beauty, and you’re simply worthy of the house. I can’t say more for you!”

“I find it a bit of a strain, mum,” Chivers candidly replied, “to keep up—fairly to call it—with what you do say.”

“That’s just what everyone finds it!”—she broke into the happiest laugh. “Yet I haven’t come here to suffer in silence, you know—to suffer, I mean, from envy and despair.” She was in constant movement, from side to side, observing, comparing, returning, taking notes while she gossiped and gossiping, too, for remembrance. The intention of remembrance even had in it, however, some prevision of failure or some alloy of irritation. “You’re so fatally right and so deadly complete, all the same, that I can really scarcely bear it: with every fascinating feature that I had already heard of and thought I was prepared for, and ever so many others that, strange to say, I hadn’t and wasn’t, and that you just spring right at me like a series of things going off. What do you call it,” she asked—“a royal salute, a hundred guns?”

Her enthusiasm had a bewildering form, but it had by this time warmed the air, and the old man rubbed his hands as over a fire to which the bellows had been applied. “I saw as soon as you arrived, mum, that you were looking for more things than ever I heard tell of!”

“Oh, I had got you by heart,” she returned, “from books and drawings and photos; I had you in my pocket when I came: so, you see, as soon as you were so good as to give me my head and let me loose, I knew my way about. It’s all here, every inch of it,” she competently continued, “and now at last I can do what I want!”

A light of consternation, at this, just glimmered in Chivers’s face. “And pray, mum, what might that be?”

“Why, take you right back with me—to Missoura Top.”

This answer seemed to fix his bewilderment, but he was there for the general convenience.

“Do I understand you, mum, that you require to take me?”

Her particular convenience, on the spot, embraced him, so new and delightful a sense had he suddenly read into her words. “Do you mean to say you’d come—as the old Family Servant? Then do, you nice real thing: it’s just what I’m dying for—an old Family Servant! You’re somebody’s else, yes—but everything, over here, is somebody’s else, and I want, too, a first-rate second-hand one, all ready made, as you are, but not too much done up. You’re the best I’ve seen yet, and I wish I could have you packed—put up in paper and bran—as I shall have my old pot there.” She whisked about, remembering, recovering, eager: “Don’t let me forget my precious pot!” Excited, with quick transitions, she quite sociably appealed to her companion, who shuffled sympathetically to where, out of harm, the object had been placed on a table. “Don’t you just love old crockery? That’s awfully sweet old Chelsea.”

He took up the piece with tenderness, though, in his general agitation, not perhaps with all the caution with which, for daily service, he handled ancient frailties. He at any rate turned on this fresh subject an interested, puzzled eye. “Where is it I’ve known this very bit—though not to say, as you do, by name?” Suddenly it came to him. “In the pew-opener’s front parlour!”

“No,” his interlocutress cried, “in the pew-opener’s best bedroom: on the old chest of drawers, you know—with those ducks of brass handles. I’ve got the handles too—I mean the whole thing; and the brass fender and fire-irons, and the chair her grandmother died in. Not in the fly,” she added—“it was such a bore that they have to be sent.”

Chivers, with the pot still in his hands, fairly rocked in the high wind of so much confidence and such great transactions. He had nothing for these, however, but approval. “You did right to take this out, mum, when the fly went to the stables. Them flymen do be cruel rash with anything that’s delicate.” Of the delicacy of the vessel it now rested with him to deposit safely again he was by this time so appreciatively aware that in returning with it to its safe niche he stumbled into some obscure trap literally laid for him by his nervousness. It was the matter of a few seconds, of a false movement, a knock of the elbow, a gasp, a shriek, a complete little crash. There was the pot on the pavement, in several pieces, and the clumsy cup-bearer blue with fear. “Mercy on us, mum,—I’ve brought shame on my old grey hairs!”

The little shriek of his companion had smothered itself in the utterance, and the next minute, with the ruin between them, they were contrastedly face to face. The charming woman, who had already found more voices in the air than anyone had found before, could, in the happy play of this power, find a poetry in her accident. “Oh, but the way you take it!” she laughed—“you’re too quaint to live!” She looked at him as if he alone had suffered—as if his suffering indeed positively added to his charm. “The way you said that now—it’s just the very ‘type’! That’s all I want of you now—to be the very type. It’s what you are, you poor dear thing—for you can’t help it; and it’s what everything and everyone else is, over here; so that you had just better all make up your minds to it and not try to shirk it. There was a type in the train with me—the ‘awfully nice girl’ of all the English novels, the ‘simple maiden in her flower’ of—who is it?—your great poet. She couldn’t help it either—in fact I wouldn’t have let her!” With this, while Chivers picked up his fragments, his lady had a happy recall. His face, as he stood there with the shapeless elements of his humiliation fairly rattling again in his hands, was a reflection of her extraordinary manner of enlarging the subject, or rather, more beneficently perhaps, the space that contained it. “By the way, the girl was coming right here. Has she come?”

Chivers crept solemnly away, as if to bury his dead, which he consigned, with dumb rites, to a situation of honourable publicity; then, as he came back, he replied without elation: “Miss Prodmore is here, mum. She’s having her tea.”

This, for his friend, was a confirmatory touch to be fitted with eagerness into the picture. “Yes, that’s exactly it—they’re always having their tea!”

“With Mr. Prodmore—in the morning-room,” the old man supplemented. “Captain Yule’s in the garden.”

“Captain Yule?”

“The new master. He’s also just arrived.”

The wonderful lady gave an immediate “Oh!” to the effect of which her silence for another moment seemed to add. “She didn’t tell me about him.”

“Well, mum,” said Chivers, “it do be a strange thing to tell. He had never—like, mum—so much as seen the place.”

“Before today—his very own?” This too, for the visitor, was an impression among impressions, and, like most of her others, it ended after an instant as a laugh. “Well, I hope he likes it!”

“I haven’t seen many, mum,” Chivers boldly declared, “that like it as much as you.”

She made with her handsome head a motion that appeared to signify still deeper things than he had caught. Her beautiful wondering eyes played high and low, like the flight of an imprisoned swallow, then, as she sank upon a seat, dropped at last as if the creature were bruised with its limits. “I should like it still better if it were my very own!”

“Well, mum,” Chivers sighed, “if it wasn’t against my duty I could wish indeed it were! But the Captain, mum,” he conscientiously added, “is the lawful heir.”

It was a wonder what she found in whatever he said; he touched with every word the spring of her friendly joy. “That’s another of your lovely old things—I adore your lawful heirs!” She appeared to have, about everything that came up, a general lucid vision that almost glorified the particular case. “He has come to take possession?”

Chivers accepted, for the credit of the house, this sustaining suggestion. “He’s a-taking of it now.”

This evoked, for his companion, an instantaneous show. “What does he do and how does he do it? Can’t I see?” She was all impatience, but she dropped to disappointment as her guide looked blank. “There’s no grand fuss——?”

“I scarce think him, mum,” Chivers with propriety hastened to respond, “the gentleman to make any about anything.”

She had to resign herself, but she smiled as she thought. “Well, perhaps I like them better when they don’t!” She had clearly a great range of taste, and it all came out in the wistfulness with which, before the notice apparently served on her, she prepared to make way. “I also”—she lingered and sighed—“have taken possession!”

Poor Chivers really rose to her. “It was you, mum,” he smiled, “took it first!”

She sadly shook her head. “Ah, but for a poor little hour! He’s for life.”

The old man gave up, after a little, with equal depression, the pretence of dealing with such realities. “For mine, mum, I do at least hope.”

She made again the circuit of the great place, picking up without interest the jacket she had on her previous entrance laid down. “I shall think of you, you know, here together.” She vaguely looked about her as for anything else to take; then abruptly, with her eyes again on Chivers: “Do you suppose he’ll be kind to you?”

His hand, in his trousers-pocket, seemed to turn the matter over. “He has already been, mum.”

“Then be sure to be so to him!” she replied with some emphasis. The house-bell sounded as she spoke, giving her quickly another thought. “Is that his bell?”

Chivers was hardly less struck. “I must see whose!”—and hurrying, on this, to the front, he presently again vanished.

His companion, left alone, stood a minute with an air in which happy possession was oddly and charmingly mingled with desperate surrender; so much as to have left you in doubt if the next of her lively motions were curiosity or disgust. Impressed, in her divided state, with a small framed plaque of enamel, she impulsively detached it from the wall and examined it with hungry tenderness. Her hovering thought was so vivid that you might almost have traced it in sound. “Why, bless me if it isn’t Limoges! I wish awfully I were a bad woman: then, I do devoutly hope, I’d just quietly take it!” It testified to the force of this temptation that on hearing a sound behind her she started like a guilty thing; recovering herself, however, and—just, of course, not to appear at fault—keeping the object familiarly in her hand as she jumped to a recognition of the gentleman who, coming in from the garden, had stopped in the open doorway. She gathered indeed from his being there a positive advantage, the full confidence of which was already in her charming tone. “Oh, Captain Yule, I’m delighted to meet you! It’s such a comfort to ask you if I may!”

His surprise kept him an instant dumb, but the effort not too closely to betray it appeared in his persuasive inflection. “If you ‘may,’ madam——?”

“Why, just be here, don’t you know? and poke round!” She presented such a course as almost vulgarly natural. “Don’t tell me I can’t now, because I already have: I’ve been upstairs and downstairs and in my lady’s chamber—I won’t answer for it even perhaps that I’ve not been in my lord’s! I got round your lovely servant—if you don’t look out I’ll grab him. If you don’t look out, you know, I’ll grab everything.” She gave fair notice and went on with amazing serenity; she gathered positive gaiety from his frank stupefaction. “That’s what I came over for—just to lay your country waste. Your house is a wild old dream; and besides”—she dropped, oddly and quaintly, into real responsible judgment—“you’ve got some quite good things. Oh, yes, you have—several: don’t coyly pretend you haven’t!” Her familiarity took these flying leaps, and she alighted, as her victim must have phrased it to himself, without turning a hair. “Don’t you know you have? Just look at that!” She thrust her enamel before him, but he took it and held it so blankly, with an attention so absorbed in the mere woman, that at the sight of his manner her zeal for his interest and her pity for his detachment again flashed out. “Don’t you know anything? Why, it’s Limoges!”

Clement Yule simply broke into a laugh—though his laugh indeed was comprehensive. “It seems absurd, but I’m not in the least acquainted with my house. I’ve never happened to see it.”

She seized his arm. “Then do let me show it to you!”

“I shall be delighted.” His laughter had redoubled in a way that spoke of his previous tension; yet his tone, as he saw Chivers return breathless from the front, showed that he had responded sincerely enough to desire a clear field. “Who in the world’s there?”

The old man was full of it. “A party!”

“A party?”

Chivers confessed to the worst. “Over from Gossage—to see the house.”

The worst, however, clearly, was quite good enough for their companion, who embraced the incident with sudden enthusiasm. “Oh, let me show it!” But before either of the men could reply she had, addressing herself to Chivers, one of those droll drops that betrayed the quickness of her wit and the freedom of her fancy. “Dear me, I forgot—you get the tips! But, you dear old creature,” she went on, “I’ll get them, too, and I’ll simply make them over to you.” She again pressed Yule—pressed him into this service. “Perhaps they’ll be bigger—for me!”

He continued to be highly amused. “I should think they’d be enormous—for you! But I should like,” he added with more concentration—“I should like extremely, you know, to go over with you alone.”

She was held a moment. “Just you and me?”

“Just you and me—as you kindly proposed.”

She stood reminded; but, throwing it off, she had her first inconsequence. “That must be for after——!”

“Ah, but not too late.” He looked at his watch. “I go back tonight.”

“Laws, sir!” Chivers irrepressibly groaned.

“You want to keep him?” the stranger asked. Captain Yule turned away at the question, but her look went after him, and she found herself, somehow, instantly answered. “Then I’ll help you,” she said to Chivers; “and the oftener we go over the better.”

Something further, on this, quite immaterial, but quite adequate, passed, while the young man’s back was turned, between the two others; in consequence of which Chivers again appealed to his master. “Shall I show them straight in, sir?”

His master, still detached, replied without looking at him. “By all means—if there’s money in it!” This was jocose, but there would have been, for an observer, an increase of hope in the old man’s departing step. The lady had exerted an influence.

She continued, for that matter, with a start of genial remembrance, to exert one in his absence. “Oh, and I promised to show it to Miss Prodmore!” Her conscience, with a kind smile for the young person she named, put the question to Clement Yule. “Won’t you call her?”

The coldness of his quick response made it practically none. “‘Call’ her? Dear lady, I don’t know her!”

“You must, then—she’s wonderful.” The face with which he met this drew from the dear lady a sharper look; but, for the aid of her good-nature, Cora Prodmore, at the moment she spoke, presented herself in the doorway of the morning-room. “See? She’s charming!” The girl, with a glare of recognition, dashed across the open as if under heavy fire; but heavy fire, alas—the extremity of exposure—was promptly embodied in her friend’s public embrace. “Miss Prodmore,” said this terrible friend, “let me present Captain Yule.” Never had so great a gulf been bridged in so free a span. “Captain Yule, Miss Prodmore. Miss Prodmore, Captain Yule.”

There was stiffness, the cold mask of terror, in such notice as either party took of this demonstration, the convenience of which was not enhanced for the divided pair by the perception that Mr. Prodmore had now followed his daughter. Cora threw herself confusedly into it indeed, as with a vain rebound into the open. “Papa, let me ‘present’ you to Mrs. Gracedew. Mrs. Gracedew, Mr. Prodmore. Mr. Prodmore, Mrs. Gracedew.”

Mrs. Gracedew, with a free salute and a distinct repetition, took in Mr. Prodmore as she had taken everything else. “Mr. Prodmore”—oh, she pronounced him, spared him nothing of himself. “So happy to meet your daughter’s father. Your daughter’s so perfect a specimen.”

Mr. Prodmore, for the first moment, had simply looked large and at sea; then, like a practical man and without more question, had quickly seized the long perch held out to him in this statement. “So perfect a specimen, yes!”—he seemed to pass it on to his young friend.

Mrs. Gracedew, if she observed his emphasis, drew from it no deterrence; she only continued to cover Cora with a gaze that kept her well in the middle. “So fresh, so quaint, so droll!”

It was apparently a result of what had passed in the morning-room that Mr. Prodmore had grasped afresh the need for effective action, which he clearly felt he did something to meet in clutching precipitately the helping hand popped so suddenly out of space, yet so beautifully gloved and so pressingly and gracefully brandished. “So fresh, so quaint, so droll!”—he again gave Captain Yule the advantage of the stranger’s impression.

To what further appreciation this might have prompted the lady herself was not, however, just then manifest; for the return of Chivers had been almost simultaneous with the advance of the Prodmores, and it had taken place with forms that made it something of a circumstance. There was positive pomp in the way he preceded several persons of both sexes, not tourists at large, but simple sightseers of the half-holiday order, plain provincial folk already, on the spot, rather awestruck. The old man, with suppressed pulls and prayers, had drawn them up in a broken line, and the habit of more peopled years, the dull drone of the dead lesson, sounded out in his prompt beginning. The party stood close, in this manner, on one side of the apartment, while the master of the house and his little circle were grouped on the other. But as Chivers, guiding his squad, reached the centre of the space, Mrs. Gracedew, markedly moved, quite unreservedly engaged, came slowly forward to meet him. “This, ladies and gentlemen,” he mechanically quavered, “is perhaps the most important feature—the grand old feudal, baronial ’all. Being, from all accounts, the most ancient portion of the edifice, it was erected in the very earliest ages.” He paused a moment, to mark his effect, then gave a little cough which had become, obviously, in these great reaches of time, an essential part of the trick. “Some do say,” he dispassionately remarked, “in the course of the fifteenth century.”

Mrs. Gracedew, who had visibly thrown herself into the working of the charm, following him with vivid sympathy and hanging on his lips, took the liberty, at this, of quite affectionately pouncing on him. “I say in the fourteenth, my dear—you’re robbing us of a hundred years!”

Her victim yielded without a struggle. “I do seem, in them dark old centuries, sometimes to trip a little.” Yet the interruption of his ancient order distinctly discomposed him, all the more that his audience, gaping with a sense of the importance of the fine point, moved in its mass a little nearer. Thus put upon his honour, he endeavoured to address the group with a dignity undiminished. “The Gothic roof is much admired, but the west gallery is a modern addition.”

His discriminations had the note of culture, but his candour, all too promptly, struck Mrs. Gracedew as excessive. “What in the name of Methuselah do you call ‘modern’? It was here at the visit of James the First, in 1611, and is supposed to have served, in the charming detail of its ornament, as a model for several that were constructed in his reign. The great fireplace,” she handsomely conceded, “is Jacobean.”

She had taken him up with such wondrous benignant authority—as if, for her life, if they were to have it, she couldn’t help taking care that they had it out; she had interposed with an assurance that so converted her—as by the wave of a great wand, the motion of one of her own free arms—from mere passive alien to domesticated dragon, that poor Chivers could only assent with grateful obeisances. She so plunged into the old book that he had quite lost his place. The two gentlemen and the young lady, moreover, were held there by the magic of her manner. His own, as he turned again to his cluster of sightseers, took refuge in its last refinement. “The tapestry on the left Italian—the elegant wood-work Flemish.”

Mrs. Gracedew was upon him again. “Excuse me if I just deprecate a misconception. The elegant wood-work Italian—the tapestry on the left Flemish.” Suddenly she put it to him before them all, pleading as familiarly and gaily as she had done when alone with him, and looking now at the others, all round, gentry and poor folk alike, for sympathy and support. She had an idea that made her dance. “Do you really mind if I just do it? Oh, I know how: I can do quite beautifully the housekeeper last week at Castle Gaunt.” She fraternised with the company as if it were a game they must play with her, though this first stage sufficiently hushed them. “How do you do? Ain’t it thrilling?” Then with a laugh as free as if, for a disguise, she had thrown her handkerchief over her head or made an apron of her tucked-up skirt, she passed to the grand manner. “Keep well together, please—we’re not doing puss-in-the-corner. I’ve my duty to all parties—I can’t be partial to one!”

The contingent from Gossage had, after all, like most contingents, its spokesman—a very erect little personage in a very new suit and a very green necktie, with a very long face and upstanding hair. It was on an evident sense of having been practically selected for encouragement that he, in turn, made choice of a question which drew all eyes. “How many parties, now, can you manage?”

Mrs. Gracedew was superbly definite. “Two. The party up and the party down.” Chivers gasped at the way she dealt with this liberty, and his impression was conspicuously deepened as she pointed to one of the escutcheons in the high hall-window. “Observe in the centre compartment the family arms.” She did take his breath away, for before he knew it she had crossed with the lightest but surest of gestures to the black old portrait, on the opposite wall, of a long-limbed gentleman in white trunk-hose. “And observe the family legs!” Her method was wholly her own, irregular and broad; she flew, familiarly, from the pavement to the roof and then dropped from the roof to the pavement as if the whole air of the place were an element in which she floated. “Observe the suit of armour worn at Tewkesbury—observe the tattered banner carried at Blenheim.” They bobbed their heads wherever she pointed, but it would have come home to any spectator that they saw her alone. This was the case quite as much with the opposite trio—the case especially with Clement Yule, who indeed made no pretence of keeping up with her signs. It was the signs themselves he looked at—not at the subjects indicated. But he never took his eyes from her, and it was as if, at last, she had been peculiarly affected by a glimpse of his attention. All her own, for a moment, frankly went back to him and was immediately determined by it. “Observe, above all, that you’re in one of the most interesting old houses, of its type, in England; for which the ages have been tender and the generations wise: letting it change so slowly that there’s always more left than taken—living their lives in it, but letting it shape their lives!”

Though this pretty speech had been unmistakeably addressed to the younger of the temporary occupants of Covering End, it was the elder who, on the spot, took it up. “A most striking and appropriate tribute to a real historical monument!” Mr. Prodmore had a natural ease that could deal handsomely with compliments, and he manifestly, moreover, like a clever man, saw even more in such an explosion of them than fully met the ear. “You do, madam, bring the whole thing out!”

The visitor who had already with such impunity ventured had, on this, a loud renewal of boldness, but for the benefit of a near neighbour. “Doesn’t she indeed, Jane, bring it out?”

Mrs. Gracedew, with a friendly laugh, caught the words in their passage. “But who in the world wants to keep it in? It isn’t a secret—it isn’t a strange cat or a political party!” The housekeeper, as she talked, had already dropped from her; her sense of the place was too fresh for control, though instead of half an hour it might have taken six months to become so fond. She soared again, at random, to the noble spring of the roof. “Just look at those lovely lines!” They all looked, all but Clement Yule, and several of the larger company, subdued, overwhelmed, nudged each other with strange sounds. Wherever she turned Mrs. Gracedew appeared to find a pretext for breaking out. “Just look at the tone of that glass, and the gilding of that leather, and the cutting of that oak, and the dear old flags of the very floor.” It came back, came back easily, her impulse to appeal to the lawful heir, and she seemed, with her smile of universal intelligence, just to demand the charity of another moment for it. “To look, in this place, is to love!”

A voice from the party she had in hand took it up with an artless guffaw that resounded more than had doubtless been meant and that, at any rate, was evidently the accompaniment of some private pinch applied to one of the ladies. “I say—to love!”

It was one of the ladies who very properly replied. “It depends on who you look at!”

Mr. Prodmore, in the geniality of the hour, made his profit of the simple joke. “Do you hear that, Captain? You must look at the right person!”

Mrs. Gracedew certainly had not been looking at the wrong one. “I don’t think Captain Yule cares. He doesn’t do justice——!”

Though her face was still gay, she had faltered, which seemed to strike the young man even more than if she had gone on. “To what, madam?”

Well, on the chance she let him have it. “To the value of your house.”

He took it beautifully. “I like to hear you express it!”

“I can’t express it!” She once more looked all round, and so much more gravely than she had yet done that she might have appeared in trouble. She tried but, with a sigh, broke down. “It’s too inexpressible!”

This was a view of the case to which Mr. Prodmore, for his own reasons, was not prepared to assent. Expression and formulation were what he naturally most desired, and he had just encountered a fountain of these things that he couldn’t prematurely suffer to fail him. “Do what you can for it, madam. It would bring it quite home.”

Thus excited, she gave with sudden sombre clearness another try. “Well—the value’s a fancy value!”

Mr. Prodmore, receiving it as more than he could have hoped, turned triumphant to his young friend. “Exactly what I told you!”

Mrs. Gracedew explained indeed as if Mr. Prodmore’s triumph was not perhaps exactly what she had argued for. Still, the truth was too great. “When a thing’s unique, it’s unique!”

That was every bit Mr. Prodmore required. “It’s unique!”

This met, moreover, the perception of the gentleman in the green necktie. “It’s unique!” They all, in fact, demonstratively—almost vociferously now—caught the point.

Mrs. Gracedew, finding herself so sustained, and still with her eyes on the lawful heirs, put it yet more strongly. “It’s worth anything you like.”

What was this but precisely what Mr. Prodmore had always striven to prove? “Anything you like!” he richly reverberated.

The pleasant discussion and the general interest seemed to bring them all together. “Twenty thousand now?” one of the gentlemen from Gossage archly inquired—a very young gentleman with an almost coaxing voice, who blushed immensely as soon as he had spoken.

He blushed still more at the way Mrs. Gracedew faced him. “I wouldn’t look at twenty thousand!”

Mr. Prodmore, on the other hand, was proportionately uplifted. “She wouldn’t look at twenty thousand!” he announced with intensity to the Captain.

The visitor who had been the first to speak gave a shrewder guess. “Thirty, then, as it stands?”

Mrs. Gracedew looked more and more responsible; she communed afresh with the place; but she too evidently had her conscience. “It would be giving it away!”

Mr. Prodmore, at this, could scarcely contain himself. “It would be giving it away!”

The second speaker had meanwhile conceived the design of showing that, though still crimson, he was not ashamed. “You’d hold out for forty——?”

Mrs. Gracedew required a minute to answer—a very marked minute during which the whole place, pale old portraits and lurking old echoes and all, might have made you feel how much depended on her; to the degree that the consciousness in her face became finally a reason for her not turning it to Gossage. “Fifty thousand, Captain Yule, is what I think I should propose.”

If the place had seemed to listen it might have been the place that, in admiring accents from the gentleman with the green tie, took up the prodigious figure. “Fifty thousand pound!”

It was echoed in a high note from the lady he had previously addressed. “Fifty thousand!”

Yet it was Mr. Prodmore who caught it up loudest and appeared to make it go furthest. “Fifty thousand—fifty thousand!” Mrs. Gracedew had put him in such spirits that he found on the spot, indicating to her his young friend, both the proper humour and the proper rigour for any question of what anyone might “propose.” “He’ll never part with the dear old home!”

Mrs. Gracedew could match at least the confidence. “Then I’ll go over it again while I have the chance.” Her own humour enjoined that she should drop into the housekeeper, in the perfect tone of which character she addressed herself once more to the party. “We now pass to the grand staircase.” She gathered her band with a brave gesture, but before she had fairly impelled them to the ascent she heard herself rather sharply challenged by Captain Yule, who, during the previous scene, had uttered no sound, yet had remained as attentive as he was impenetrable. “Please let them pass without you!”

She was taken by surprise. “And stay here with you?”

“If you’ll be so good. I want to speak to you.” Turning then to Chivers and frowning on the party, he delivered himself for the first time as a person in a position. “For God’s sake, remove them!”

The old man, at this blast of impatience, instantly fluttered forward. “We now pass to the grand staircase.”

They all passed, Chivers covering their scattered ascent as a shepherd scales a hillside with his flock; but it became evident during the manœuvre that Cora Prodmore was quite out of tune. She had been standing beyond and rather behind Captain Yule; but she now moved quickly round and reached her new friend’s right. “Mrs. Gracedew, may I speak to you?”

Her father, before the reply could come, had taken up the place. “After Captain Yule, my dear.” He was in a state of positively polished lucidity. “You must make the most—don’t you see?—of the opportunity of the others!”

He waved her to the staircase as one who knew what he was about, but, while the young man, turning his back, moved consciously and nervously away, the girl renewed her effort to provoke Mrs. Gracedew to detain her. It happened, to her sorrow, that this lady appeared for the moment, to the detriment of any free attention, to be absorbed in Captain Yule’s manner; so that Cora could scarce disengage her without some air of invidious reference to it. Recognising as much, she could only for two seconds, but with great yearning, parry her own antagonist. “She’ll help me, I think, papa!”

“That’s exactly what strikes me, love!” he cheerfully replied. “But I’ll help you too!” He gave her, toward the stairs, a push proportioned both to his authority and to her weight; and while she reluctantly climbed in the wake of the visitors, he laid on Mrs. Gracedew’s arm, with a portentous glance at Captain Yule, a hand of commanding significance. “Just pile it on!”

Her attention came back—she seemed to see. “He doesn’t like it?”

“Not half enough. Bring him round.”

Her eyes rested again on their companion, who had fidgeted further away and who now, with his hands in his pockets and unaware of this private passage, stood again in the open doorway and gazed into the grey court. Something in the sight determined her. “I’ll bring him round.”

But at this moment Cora, pausing half-way up, sent down another entreaty. “Mrs. Gracedew, will you see me?”

The charming woman looked at her watch. “In ten minutes,” she smiled back.

Mr. Prodmore, bland and assured, looked at his own. “You could put him through in five—but I’ll allow you twenty. There!” he decisively cried to his daughter, whom he quickly rejoined and hustled on her course. Mrs. Gracedew kissed after her a hand of vague comfort.

IV

The silence that reigned between the pair might have been registered as embarrassing had it lasted a trifle longer. Yule had continued to turn his back, but he faced about, though he was distinctly grave, in time to avert an awkwardness. “How do you come to know so much about my house?”

She was as distinctly not grave. “How do you come to know so little?”

“It’s not my fault,” he said very gently. “A particular combination of misfortunes has forbidden me, till this hour, to come within a mile of it.”

These words evidently struck her as so exactly the right ones to proceed from the lawful heir that such a felicity of misery could only quicken her interest. He was plainly as good in his way as the old butler—the particular combination of misfortunes corresponded to the lifelong service. Her interest, none the less, in its turn, could only quicken her pity, and all her emotions, we have already seen, found prompt enough expression. What could any expression do indeed now but mark the romantic reality? “Why, you poor thing!”—she came toward him on the weary road. “Now that you’ve got here I hope at least you’ll stay.” Their intercourse must pitch itself—so far as she was concerned—in some key that would make up for things. “Do make yourself comfortable. Don’t mind me.”

Yule looked a shade less serious. “That’s exactly what I wanted to say to you!”

She was struck with the way it came in. “Well, if you had been haughty, I shouldn’t have been quite crushed, should I?”

The young man’s gravity, at this, completely yielded. “I’m never haughty—oh, no!”

She seemed even more amused. “Fortunately then, as I’m never crushed. I don’t think,” she added, “that I’m really as crushable as you.”

The smile with which he received this failed to conceal completely that it was something of a home thrust. “Aren’t we really all crushable—by the right thing?”

She considered a little. “Don’t you mean rather by the wrong?”

He had got, clearly, a trifle more accustomed to her being extraordinary. “Are you sure we always know them apart?”

She weighed the responsibility. “I always do. Don’t you?”

“Not quite every time!”

“Oh,” she replied, “I don’t think, thank goodness, we have positively ‘every time’ to distinguish.”

“Yet we must always act,” he objected.

She turned this over; then with her wonderful living look, “I’m glad to hear it,” she exclaimed, “because, I fear, I always do! You’ll certainly think,” she added with more gravity, “that I’ve taken a line today!”

“Do you mean that of mistress of the house? Yes—you do seem in possession!”

“You don’t!” she honestly answered; after which, as to attenuate a little the rigour of the charge: “You don’t comfortably look it, I mean. You don’t look”—she was very serious—“as I want you to.”

It was when she was most serious that she was funniest. “How do you ‘want’ me to look?”

She endeavoured, while he watched her, to make up her mind, but seemed only, after an instant, to recognise a difficulty. “When you look at me, you’re all right!” she sighed. It was an obstacle to her lesson, and she cast her eyes about. “Look at that chimneypiece.”

“Well——?” he inquired as his eyes came back from it.

“You mean to say it isn’t lovely?”

He returned to it without passion—gave a vivid sign of mere disability. “I’m sure I don’t know. I don’t mean to say anything. I’m a rank outsider.”

It had an instant effect on her—she almost pounced upon him. “Then you must let me put you up!”

“Up to what?”

“Up to everything!”—his levity added to her earnestness. “You were smoking when you came in,” she said as she glanced about. “Where’s your cigarette?”

The young man appreciatively produced another. “I thought perhaps I mightn’t—here.”

“You may everywhere.”

He bent his head to the information. “Everywhere.”

She laughed at his docility, yet could only wish to presume upon it. “It’s a rule of the house!”

He took in the place with greater pleasure. “What delightful rules!”

“How could such a house have any others?”—she was already launched again in her brave relation to it. “I may go up just once more—mayn’t I—to the long gallery?”

How could he tell? “The long gallery?”

With an added glow she remembered. “I forgot you’ve never seen it. Why, it’s the leading thing about you!” She was full, on the spot, of the pride of showing it. “Come right up!”

Clement Yule, half seated on a table from which his long left leg nervously swung, only looked at her and smiled and smoked. “There’s a party up.”

She remembered afresh. “So we must be the party down? Well, you must give me a chance. That long gallery’s the principal thing I came over for.”

She was strangest of all when she explained. “Where in heaven’s name did you come over from?”

“Missoura Top, where I’m building—just in this style. I came for plans and ideas,” Mrs. Gracedew serenely pursued. “I felt I must look right at you.”

“But what did you know about us?”

She kept it a moment as if it were too good to give him all at once. “Everything!”

He seemed indeed almost afraid to touch it. “At ‘Missoura Top’?”

“Why not? It’s a growing place—forty thousand the last census.” She hesitated; then as if her warrant should be slightly more personal: “My husband left it to me.”