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He challenged this description with a strange gleam. “You suppose it will be a rage?”
She laughed out at his look. “Are you afraid of the love that kills?”
He grew singularly grave. “Will it kill?”
“Great passions have!”—she was highly amused.
But he could only stare. “Is it a great passion?”
“Surely—when so many feel it!”
He was fairly bewildered. “But how many?”
She reckoned them up. “Let’s see. If you count them all––”
“‘All’?” Clement Yule gasped.
She looked at him slightly mystified. “I see. You knock off some. About half?”
It was too obscure—he broke down. “Whom on earth are you talking about?”
“Why, the electors––”
“Of Gossage?”—he leaped at it. “Oh!”
“I got the whole thing up—there are six thousand. It’s such a fine figure!” said Mrs. Gracedew.
He had sharply passed from her, to cover his mistake, and it carried him half round the hall. Then, as if aware that this pause itself compromised him, he came back confusedly. “Has she a fine figure?”
But her own thoughts were off. “‘She’?”
He blushed and recovered himself. “Aren’t we talking––”
“Of Gossage? Oh, yes—she has every charm! Good-bye,” said Mrs. Gracedew.
He pulled the longest face, but was kept dumb by the very decision with which she again began to gather herself. “You don’t mean to say you’re going?”
“You don’t mean to say you’re surprised at it? Haven’t I done what I told you I had been so mystically moved to come for?” She recalled to him by her renewed supreme survey the limited character of this errand. “You dear old thing—you’re saved!”
Clement Yule might, by his simultaneous action, have given himself out for lost. “For God’s sake,” he cried as he circled earnestly round her, “don’t go till I can come back to thank you! I promised to return immediately to Prodmore.”
This completely settled his visitor. “Then don’t let me, for a moment more, keep you away from him. You must have such lots to talk comfortably over.”
The young man’s embrace of that was, in his restless movement, to roam to the end of the hall furthest from the stairs. But here his assent was entire. “I certainly feel that I must see him again. Yes, decidedly, I must!”
“Is he out there?” Mrs. Gracedew lightly asked.
He turned short round. “No—I left him in the long gallery.”
“You saw that, then?—Isn’t it lovely?”
Clement Yule rather wondered. “I didn’t notice it. How could I?”
His face was so woeful that she broke into a laugh. “How couldn’t you? Notice it now, then. Go up to him!”
He crossed at last to the staircase, but at the foot he stopped again. “Will you wait for me?”
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