The visitor who had been the first to speak gave a shrewder guess. “Thirty, then, as it stands?”
Mrs. Gracedew looked more and more responsible; she communed afresh with the place; but she too evidently had her conscience. “It would be giving it away!”
Mr. Prodmore, at this, could scarcely contain himself. “It would be giving it away!”
The second speaker had meanwhile conceived the design of showing that, though still crimson, he was not ashamed. “You’d hold out for forty——?”
Mrs. Gracedew required a minute to answer—a very marked minute during which the whole place, pale old portraits and lurking old echoes and all, might have made you feel how much depended on her; to the degree that the consciousness in her face became finally a reason for her not turning it to Gossage. “Fifty thousand, Captain Yule, is what I think I should propose.”
If the place had seemed to listen it might have been the place that, in admiring accents from the gentleman with the green tie, took up the prodigious figure. “Fifty thousand pound!”
It was echoed in a high note from the lady he had previously addressed. “Fifty thousand!”
Yet it was Mr. Prodmore who caught it up loudest and appeared to make it go furthest. “Fifty thousand—fifty thousand!” Mrs. Gracedew had put him in such spirits that he found on the spot, indicating to her his young friend, both the proper humour and the proper rigour for any question of what anyone might “propose.” “He’ll never part with the dear old home!”
Mrs. Gracedew could match at least the confidence. “Then I’ll go over it again while I have the chance.” Her own humour enjoined that she should drop into the housekeeper, in the perfect tone of which character she addressed herself once more to the party. “We now pass to the grand staircase.” She gathered her band with a brave gesture, but before she had fairly impelled them to the ascent she heard herself rather sharply challenged by Captain Yule, who, during the previous scene, had uttered no sound, yet had remained as attentive as he was impenetrable. “Please let them pass without you!”
She was taken by surprise. “And stay here with you?”