The charming woman looked at her watch. “In ten minutes,” she smiled back.
Mr. Prodmore, bland and assured, looked at his own. “You could put him through in five—but I’ll allow you twenty. There!” he decisively cried to his daughter, whom he quickly rejoined and hustled on her course. Mrs. Gracedew kissed after her a hand of vague comfort.
IV
The silence that reigned between the pair might have been registered as embarrassing had it lasted a trifle longer. Yule had continued to turn his back, but he faced about, though he was distinctly grave, in time to avert an awkwardness. “How do you come to know so much about my house?”
She 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 evidently struck her as so exactly the right ones to proceed from the lawful heir that such a felicity of misery could only quicken her interest. He was plainly as good in his way as the old butler—the particular combination of misfortunes corresponded to the lifelong service. Her interest, none the less, in its turn, could only quicken her pity, and all her emotions, we have already seen, found prompt enough expression. What could any expression do indeed now but mark the romantic reality? “Why, you poor thing!”—she came toward him on the weary road. “Now that you’ve got here I hope at least you’ll stay.” Their intercourse must pitch itself—so far as she was concerned—in some key that would make up for things. “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, at this, completely yielded. “I’m never haughty—oh, no!”