Part 63

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Then what did you do it for?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“So I saw!”

“I couldn’t get him out.”

“So he saw!”

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

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

“And when do you meet me?”

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

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

“Surely. I didn’t walk.”

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