She gave a laugh, and her laugh brought her nearer. “I’d take it in a minute!”
Clement Yule remained grave. “I shouldn’t have the face to charge you a rent that would make it worth one’s while, and I think even you, dear lady”—his voice just trembled as he risked that address—“wouldn’t have the face to offer me one.” He paused, but something in his aspect and manner checked in her now any impulse to read his meaning too soon. “My lovely inheritance is Dead Sea fruit. It’s mortgaged for all it’s worth and I haven’t the means to pay the interest. If by a miracle I could scrape the money together, it would leave me without a penny to live on.” He puffed his cigarette profusely. “So if I find the old home at last—I lose it by the same luck!”
Mrs. Gracedew had hung upon his words, and she seemed still to wait, in visible horror, for something that would improve on them. But when she had to take them for his last, “I never heard of anything so awful!” she broke out. “Do you mean to say you can’t arrange——?”
“Oh, yes,” he promptly replied, “an arrangement—if that be the name to give it—has been definitely proposed to me.”
“What’s the matter, then?”—she had dropped into relief. “For heaven’s sake, you poor thing, definitely accept it!”
He laughed, though with little joy, at her sweet simplifications. “I’ve made up my mind in the last quarter of an hour that I can’t. It’s such a peculiar case.”
Mrs. Gracedew frankly wondered; her bias was clearly sceptical. “How peculiar——?”
He found the measure difficult to give. “Well—more peculiar than most cases.”
Still she was not satisfied. “More peculiar than mine?”
“Than yours?”—Clement Yule knew nothing about that.