Part 45

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?”