Part 65

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

“Quarrel with you?” he looked amazement.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He had come round to it now, as mechanically, in intenser thought, he smoothed down the thick hair he had rubbed up; but his face soon enough gave out, in wonder and pain, that his freedom was somehow only a new predicament. “How can I take any way at all, dear lady----?”

“If I only stick here in your path?” She had taken him straight up, and with spirit; and the same spirit bore her to the end. “I won’t stick a moment more! Haven’t I been trying this age to leave you?”

Clement Yule, for all answer, caught her sharply, in her passage, by the arm. “You surrender your rights?” He was for an instant almost terrible.

She quite turned pale with it. “Weren’t you ready to surrender yours?”

“I hadn’t any, so it was deuced easy. I hadn’t paid for them.”

Oh that, she let him see,--even though with his continued grasp he might hurt her,--had nothing in it! “Your ancestors had paid: it’s the same thing.” Erect there in the brightness of her triumph and the force of her logic, she must yet, to anticipate his return, take a stride--like a sudden dip into a gully and the scramble up on the other bank--that put her dignity to the test. “You’re just, in a manner, my tenant.”

“But how can I treat that as such a mere detail? I’m your tenant on what terms?”

“Oh, any terms--choose them for yourself!” She made an attempt to free her arm--gave it a small vain shake. Then, as if to bribe him to let her go: “You can write me about them.”

He appeared to consider it. “To Missoura Top?”

She fully assented. “I go right back.” As if it had put him off his guard she broke away. “Farewell!”

She broke away, but he broke faster, and once more, nearer the door, he had barred her escape. “Just one little moment, please. If you won’t tell me your own terms, you must at least tell me Prodmore’s.”

Ah, the fiend--she could never squeeze past that! All she could do, for the instant, was to reverberate foolishly “Prodmore’s?”

But there was nothing foolish, at last, about him. “How you did it--how you managed him.” His feet were firm while he waited, though he had to wait some time. “You bought him out?”

She made less of it than, clearly, he had ever heard made of a stroke of business; it might have been a case of his owing her ninepence. “I bought him out.”

He wanted at least the exact sum. “For how much?” Her silence seemed to say that she had made no note of it, but his pressure only increased. “I really must know.”

She continued to try to treat it as if she had merely paid for his cab--she put even what she could of that suggestion into a tender, helpless, obstinate headshake. “You shall never know!”

The only thing his own manner met was the obstinacy. “I’ll get it from him!”

She repeated her headshake, but with a world of sadness added, “Get it if you can!”

He looked into her eyes now as if it was the sadness that struck him most. “He won’t say, because he did you?”