If the place had seemed to listen, the gentleman with the green tie took it up. “Fifty thousand pound!” A lady echoed. “Fifty thousand!” But Prodmore caught it loudest. “Fifty thousand—fifty thousand!” He indicated Yule. “He’ll never part with the dear old home!”
Mrs. Gracedew matched his confidence. “Then I’ll go over it again while I have the chance.” She dropped into the housekeeper, addressing the party. “We now pass to the grand staircase.” She gathered her band, but heard herself sharply challenged by Yule, who had been attentive and impenetrable. “Please let them pass without you!”
“And stay here with you?”
“If you’ll be so good. I want to speak to you.” Turning to Chivers, he frowned on the party. “For God’s sake, remove them!”
The old man fluttered forward. “We now pass to the grand staircase.”
They passed, Chivers covering the ascent as a shepherd scales a hillside; but Cora Prodmore, standing beyond Yule, moved quickly round to Mrs. Gracedew. “Mrs. Gracedew, may I speak to you?”
Her father took up the place. “After Captain Yule, my dear. You must make the most of the opportunity of the others!” He waved her toward the stairs, but she renewed her effort. “She’ll help me, I think, papa!”
“That’s exactly what strikes me! But I’ll help you too!” He gave her a push proportioned to his authority, and while Yule turned away, he laid a hand of commanding significance on Mrs. Gracedew’s arm. “Just pile it on!”
Her attention came back. “He doesn’t like it?”
“Not half enough. Bring him round.”
Her eyes rested on Yule, who had fidgeted away to the open doorway. “I’ll bring him round.”
But 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.
Prodmore looked at his own. “You could put him through in five—but I’ll allow you twenty.” He decisively hustled his daughter on. Mrs. Gracedew kissed after her a hand of vague comfort.
IV
The hall of Covering End held a silence that might have curdled into awkwardness had it lasted another moment. Captain Clement Yule had his back turned, but he swung about—distinctly grave, though—to meet the gaze of the woman who had just astonished him. He was the heir to this place, and yet he stood in it like a stranger.
“How do you come to know so much about my house?” he asked.
Mrs. Gracedew 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 struck her as so exactly the right ones to proceed from the lawful heir that her interest quickened. The combination of misfortunes corresponded to lifelong service; he was plainly as good in his way as the old butler. “Why, you poor thing!” she cried, coming toward him on the weary road. “Now that you’ve got here I hope at least you’ll stay. 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 completely yielded. “I’m never haughty—oh, no!”
She seemed even more amused. “Fortunately then, as I’m never crushed. I don’t think I’m really as crushable as you.”
The smile with which he received this failed to conceal that it was something of a home thrust. “Aren’t we really all crushable—by the right thing?”
She considered. “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, 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, 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; then, as to attenuate the rigour of the charge: “You don’t comfortably look it, I mean. You don’t look 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 to make up her mind, but seemed only to recognise a difficulty. “When you look at me, you’re all right!” she sighed. “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! You were smoking when you came in. 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. “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? I may go up just once more—mayn’t I?—to the long gallery?”
“The long gallery?” He could not tell her.
She remembered. “I forgot you’ve never seen it. Why, it’s the leading thing about you!” She was full 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. “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.”
“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. “Everything!”
He seemed almost afraid to touch it. “At ‘Missoura Top’?”
“Why not? It’s a growing place—forty thousand the last census. My husband left it to me.”
The young man presently changed his posture. “You’re a widow?”
Nothing was wanting to the simplicity of her quiet assent. “A very lone woman.” Her face had the vision of a long distance. “My loneliness is great enough to want something big to hold it—and my taste good enough to want something beautiful. You see, I had your picture.”
“Mine?”
Her smile reassured him. “A water colour I chanced on in Boston.”
“In Boston? What has Boston heard of me?”
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